She displays a great talent for turning a phrase and to making the various characters and situations feel as though if they were first told by bards or minstrels rather than being composed by a single author in the first years of the 21st century. Valente demonstrates here the ability to create vivid tales that bear only just enough of a passing resemblance to “traditional” European fairy tales to seem familiar, but which also contain elements of Eastern legends and things more modern in scope and feel. This volume ends with dawn breaking and the stories ending albeit only for a time and perhaps with a more ominous tale to emerge from this meeting of the prince and the mysterious tattooed girl. And through it all, these themes revert back to the frame tale and perhaps to our own fascination with stories and the imagined possibilities that fairy tales bear.

Dreams beget dreams and a whole host of possibilities and alternate meanings arise within the texts of stories that feel “familiar” to readers. Transformations occur that are not wholly undesired. These stories, which often involve people, animals, and situations that might at first glance seem akin to those of The Arabian Nights, quickly bend and twist preconceived notions of how a fairy tale ought to commence and end. Fascinated by her eyes, the prince becomes more and more enthralled with the stories that she begins to tell. Curious, this boy wanders into this forbidden zone and he and the girl strike up a conversation.

It opens with a deceivingly simple frame story: A girl with odd, tattooed eyes has been sequestered in a garden. T he Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden is the first volume of a duology (the second volume, The Orphan’s Tale: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, is due to be released next week in the US). Whether or not one will enjoy this type of story depends heavily upon the skills of the author and how well each story relates to each other and to the frame story.

This makes for a reading experience that is unlike most of the fiction that is published under the SF aegis every year. While the other three finalists that I reviewed so far were either the beginning or the continuation of a multi-volume saga, Valente’s book is not so much a novel as it is a frame story that has dozens of other stories nested within it.

Valente’s first “major release,” The Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden, differs significantly from the other finalists.

Orphan's tales in the night garden