In the Cities of Coin and Spice

Cartherynne Valente
Completed 2/4/2022, Reviewed 2/4/2022
4 stars

I missed something with this book.  It’s a continuation of In the Night Garden.  It has the same wild form and the same amazing tales grounded in mythology and fairy tales.  But I had a hard time remembering the characters from the stories as they progressed.  If I read a lot in one night, I could get into it.  But the next night, I forgot enough details that I was lost for a while.  This didn’t happen in Night Garden.  I think this book was just too much of a good thing.  Together the two volumes are well over 900 pages.  That’s a lot of interwoven storytelling.  It’s done masterfully, though, which is why this two-volume set really deserved its 2008 Mythopoeic Award. 

The book continues the story of the strange, shunned girl living in the gardens of the Sultan.  She is met regularly by his son to hear the stories that are printed around her eyes.  This time, there’s the addition of one of the Sultan’s daughters who is about to be married off and is terrified of it.  She has overheard the storytelling and is as enrapt as her little brother.  There are two major stories within which other tales are interwoven.  The first is about a boy and a girl who are taken by strange creatures and forced to work in a coin minting factory.  When they escape, they meet a man and his manticore wife who tells them all sorts of stories.  The second involves a mute woman and her faithful leopard who meet an imprisoned Djinn.  The stories within stories include bird women who communicate by writing with their feet in elaborate dances, a spider who wants to be a weaver, a woman with violin bows for fingers, and djinn who wants to save a dying town from an invasion.

I can’t say enough about the prose.  It’s amazing.  The characterization is tremendous.  And the imagination that went into this world building is simply phenomenal.  Perhaps it was the complexity of the world that made it difficult for me to follow the stories.  Once again, the form is stories within stories, written in a recursive way.  So to follow all the plots in this complicated world full of strange and magical beings takes a lot of effort.  And my heart was just not into it.

Going into the book anymore would just be a repeat of Night Garden, so I won’t keep heaping the same superlatives.  But I give this book only four stars out of five.  That might be an injustice because maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for the book.  I’ll let it stand though.  Sometimes you get a book that just thoroughly amazes you.  When you get to the sequel, though, some of that may wear off.  It did for me.  I’m still giving it a high rating though because Valente is truly an amazing writer to be able to keep this up for nearly a thousand pages.  I definitely recommend the pair, referred to as “The Orphan’s Tales”.  And unlike other multi-volume sets, I recommend reading them together to keep the momentum going.