Winner of the 2006 James Tiptree, Jr. Award

A Kirkus Top Ten SF Books of 2006 Pick!

Selected for the 2007 New York Public Library Books For The Teen Age List!

Interviews

• On the Spot at Fantasybookspot: Catherynne M. Valente
• SciFi Channel
• Bookslut
• By the Way with John Scalzi
• Interview on the Dec 9 2006 Hour of the Wolf radio program (note: extensive musical intro) - 20.7Mb streaming MP3

Booklist, Oct. 15, Starred Review

The opening volume of the Orphan's Tales begins in a palace garden, where a girl has been abandoned because of the strange, ink-black stain around her eyes and over her eyelids. Because the sultan and his nobles wish to avoid the problem she presents, she is left to wander the gardens, alone until another child, a boy, comes and speaks to her. She reveals the secret of her ink-stained eyes, that they contain many tales. In return for the boy's company, she tells him stories, beginning with the tale of the prince Leander. Each succeeding story grows from the one before it, characters recounting tales they were told and even weaving them back together. There is an entire mythology in this book, in which the themes of familiar fairy tales are picked apart and rearranged into a new and wonderful whole. The narrative is a nested, many-faceted thing, ever circling back to the girl in the palace garden and the prince she is telling the tales to in a wonderful interpretation of what fairy tales ought to be. The illustrations by Michael Kaluta constitute an excellent supplement, reminiscent of illustrations of such fairy-tale books as Andrew Lang's, though Kaluta does no toning down for Victorian sensibilities.

Kirkus, Aug. 1, Starred Review

A tale of revenge, magic and family.

Valente’s publisher compares this book to Arabian Nights, and that comparison is hardly hyperbole. An exotic and unnamed young lady with tattoos around her eyelids has been exiled to the garden of a palace, existing on the scraps and fruits left to her by the rest of the court, who shun her for her mysteriousness. But one unnamed boy is brave enough to talk to her, and she begins to tell him a fairy tale about a young Prince who kills a goose. Only the day is finished before the story is done, and the unnamed boy must return to hear the rest of the tale. From this story emerges another, and then another... As time progresses, the young boy risks the antipathy of the rest of the court to continue listening to this interweaving story of magic, adventure, quests and murders, handed down through generations of women.

A work of beautifully relayed, interlinked fairy tales.

Publishers Weekly

A lonely girl with a dark tattoo across her eyelids made up of words spelling out countless tales unfolds a fabulous, recursive Arabian Nights-style narrative of stories within stories in this first of a new fantasy series from Valente (The Grass-Cutting Sword). The fantastic tales involve creation myths, shape-changing creatures, true love sought and thwarted, theorems of princely behavior, patricide, sea monsters, kindness and cruelty. As a sainted priestess explains, stories "are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words," and this volume does not so much arrive at a conclusion but stops abruptly, leaving room for endless sequels. Each descriptive phrase and story blossoms into another, creating a lush, hallucinogenic effect.

Library Journal (starred review)

A young girl lives in the palace garden, an outcast because of the strange inky tattoos around her eyes. These markings hold entire stories of enchanted beasts, magical horses, wizards, and other magnificent and mysterious beings, part of an intricately woven tapestry of tales that make up the history of the exiled girl. When a young prince convinces the girl to tell him one of her stories, he begins a journey that will bring him a little closer to a great mystery. Valente's lyrical prose and masterful storytelling brings to life a fabulous world, solidifies Valente's (Yume No Hun; The Labryinth) place at the forefront of imaginative storytelling, and belongs in libraries of all sizes.

Entertainment Weekly

Lyrical, witchy... mixes feminist grit with pixie dust.

Washington Post

Catherynne M. Valente's first three novels earned her a reputation as a bold, skillful writer. Her latest, The Orphan's Tales, reaffirms that early acclaim... These are fairy tales that bite and bleed. Every moment of lyricism is countered by one of clear-eyed honesty, and sometimes the moments combine, as in the tale of the monstrous Leucrotta: "For witches, there is but one King and one Palace -- the one who has wronged them, and the house in which he lives."

A welcome humor also pervades the book, helping imbue it with a sense of larger perspective while still allowing each persona a distinct voice. Says one of Sigrid's followers, "Stories are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words." Now we wait for Valente to bend her knee again and make more myths.

Fantasy & Science Fiction

The women here are earthy, ugly, lonely, beautiful, and often isolated; the mothers are frequently evil, the stepmothers often good; the villains of one piece deserve pity when approached from a different teller’s tale, and in some cases, the warranted actions of one set of story heroes affect another set, unknown to them, in the worst possible ways. The underlying myths of creation are elegant, and although they come stretched from whole, new cloth, they have an edge to them that makes them more real than tropes which are more familiar.

Realms of Fantasy

The movement is inward, then outward again, then inward, from the depths to the surface and back again, in a cyclical pattern appropriately reminiscent of sleep rhythms or the stitches that make up a tapestry. This structure works beautifully to build suspense and layer complexity into the novel. Very early it becomes apparent that each of the tales related by Valente's characters, of pirates, monsters, shape-shifters, and living stars, is a facet of a bigger tale: a tale too large for a single volume to contain.

Just as extraordinary as the unflagging yet never grasping inventiveness that distinguishes these pages, and which holds not only for the individual stories but the vast mythos that slowly emerges into view, underpinning and overarching them, is the degree to which Valente succeeds in grounding her flights of fancy in characters—some human, some not—that we come to know and care deeply about.

Strange Horizons

The reader is thus guided through a wondrous land of interconnected stories, so that reading becomes an experience similar to that of a swimmer who descends from the surface of the sea to explore a drowned city, exploring the buildings and palaces within the city and then the rooms within the palaces, and, from these rooms, going through doorways that lead to still more places to be discovered. It is a little disorienting, and the reader might sometimes get lost and wonder just where this particular story is within the larger structure-but the stories and their interconnections stay surprisingly lucid, and the act of reading becomes an adventure in itself... Scheherazade has learned a few new tricks.

Fantasy Book Spot

In short, In the Night Garden is downright folk-funky, with DJ Cat V scratching and mixing myth and lore with an original blend given previously untold life by a writer who ultimately made me ponder the question of what happens when a neverending story ends, while almost making me forget to ask about the power in the name of the teller. The Orphan's Tales is the poet, short fiction writer, and novelist maximizing her entire skill set in an offering that caters to the sensibilities of the fan of all forms.

SF Site Featured Review

Every tale told by the narrator brims with the stuff of life. At turns poetic, sumptuous, beguiling and numinous, the tales are interspersed by sly glimpses of the growing relationship between the storyteller and her prince. The overall effect is to make reading In the Night Garden as close to a genuinely magical experience as it's possible to get, and elevates the work above most other contemporary fantasy. One day in the not too distant future, it could easily come to be regarded as a literary classic. Savvy school librarians should add it to their lists right now. Cover to cover, this is an astonishing work which reinterprets and redefines the definition of a modern classic fairytale.

Green Man Review (Best Mythopoeic Work of 2006)

Valente's prose is creative and sophisticated; her imagery is intricate and arresting. Her skill is the treasure that allows this textual matryoshka to work. Each individual story is polished and utterly absorbing- a world unto itself, from which the reader is pulled away too soon. Yet the author immediately sweeps into the delights of another new character, new puzzle, new danger. One moment the reader is enraptured with a battle between a leucrotta and a shape-shifting bear, the next moment, empathizing with an outcast sorceress, and the next, mourning the fall of a race of wild horses. This extraction and re-immersion happens so completely, so frequently, that after a while the reader reaches a Zen-like state, bobbing along the narrative sea like driftwood, though not nearly so detached. Some tales had me laughing out loud, some tapped a deep well of happiness, and at least one left me with such a lingering sense of horror that I could not pick the book up again for days. I should note here that this is not a book of fairytales for children; it is often dark and sometimes unflinchingly violent. However, it is frequently marked by a transcendent beauty as well.

Any lover of well-written fantasy will find much to enjoy about Valente's book, for the dozens of diverse and extraordinary tales in the volume share magic as their binding factor. And like an impossible mystery that one can never untangle before the denouement, patterns and protagonists from all through the book do mesh like puzzle pieces by the Tales' end. Valente's philosophy on the unusual structure of the novel seemingly peeks through when a sainted pirate remarks, "Stories ... are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words." Reverence is a key theme cutting across all the winding pathways of story in the book, reverence for language, for spirituality, for nature, for friendship, sacrifice, determination, and for the wonder in the world that can't be explained away.

SFRevu

What Valente has accomplished in this book is far more than a collection of stories; she has sown the seeds of an entire mythos, all her own. The blooms in her night garden dazzle and bewitch, and are wondrous fair.

Fast Forward Book Review

This is a work full of color, depth and enchantment, a veritable feast of enthralling stories that just make you want to read one more. Not only are these fascinating tales, but the writing is beautiful, with a lyric feel that adds luster to each work. How can you not want to read about the man who dressed in the moon or a pumpkin tree? The experience is made all the richer by the wonderfully detailed illustrations by Michael Kaluta, giving us a glimpse of the Marsh King or the head of the Black Papess. I enthusiastically recommend this book and am looking forward to the next volume: join me In the Night Garden and see what wonders it holds.