The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente is the sequel to the wonderful The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It's a few years after the events in the first book and September is now 13 and her father has gone to the war in Europe and her mother is working at a factory building airplanes.
The first chapter ends with September charging across the Nebraska prairie after a rowboat and into Fairyland, just as her mother comes out of the house in tears. These are the sort of profound images that Valente creates in her fiction which displays the issues I have with the Young Adult category. Many of the things that the author is alluding to are going to go over the heads of a YA audience and in many ways this book is more "Adult" than a book that appears on the Nebula award nominee list this year, Ironskin by Tina Connolly (yes, I've read this now, review in the works).
I also think it's criminal that this one didn't get on the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy nominee list, but I have not read anything else on that list as yet (although Seraphina by Rachel Hartman and Every Day by David Levithan are high on my to read list at the moment), so I don't really know where the benchmark sits.
This story deals with the aftermath of September losing her shadow to Fairyland-Below in the first book. Her shadow is now Halloween, the Hollow-Queen, and she's running rampant in the underworld of Fairyland, stealing the shadows of all in Fairyland-Above and their magic in the process. September meets many characters from the first book again (or their shadows at least) as well as some brilliant new ones.
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