Review: The Glass Town Game

The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was fortunate to receive an Advance Review Copy of this book. And I mean way fortunate because my requests on both Net Galley and Edelweiss Plus are still "pending" (i.e. in limbo) for the past two months. Luck was mine with a paper ARC! Also to note: This book was reviewed without the accompanying artwork.

So if you know me, you know I have loved Cat Valente's works ever since I first opened The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden in 2007. To be honest, I would read her cereal box blurbs if she wrote them and I would listen to her soothing voice read the telephone book (yellow pages, please). Whether her lyrical Orphan's Tales, the whimsy of her Fairyland books or the clever Russian folklore meets Soviet Russia mashup Deathless, I've loved just about everything she's put her keyboard to, including her Twitter feed. With that said, this is a very odd book to me. It's marked as Middle Grade Fiction, ages 10 and up. I can't really see it as a book for a 10 year old, however, as its structure and language seem far too sophisticated for a ten or eleven year old child. It might not be picked up by young adults, either, because let's face it, toy soldiers are not popular with many teens these days. As I say below, I settled on its being a book for families.

The Glass Town Game features a fictionalized story about the four real-life Brontë siblings, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell. As Judith Shulevitz said last year in The Atlantic , the amount of related work, whether biographical or fictional, related to the Brontës is something of a cult. This book might well be a get 'em early story, to hook children's interest on this famous literary family. It is like a story (their creation, a world of make-believe) within a story (Valente's creation), and is quite clever and beautifully written. I can't wait to hear it read aloud. It begs to be read aloud. There are aspects of a truly classic children's story here, a kind of portal fantasy with the depth and complexity that you don't often see. What I'm not sure of, however, is whether it works as a piece of juvenilia for its target audience. I think a lot of the book is largely going to be lost on children, but I'm not sure adults, especially Brontë-loving adults, will pick the book up for themselves and enjoy it as the very sophisticated children's book that it is intended to be, either. My conclusion is that this is the sort of book that you read aloud to and with your children, and intersperse with little details like Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Villette, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights , Anne The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Branwell was an artist, and here, have a look at their house in Haworth, look at this picture of Charlotte, etc. The beastly Cowan Bridge School (which sadly lived on well into the 21st Century as Casterton School, rather than falling to the fate the children envision or create) can be pointed out as informing Jane Eyre's miserable experience at Lowood School, and the death of her beloved friend Helen was clearly an expression of the deaths of Charlotte's sisters Maria and Lizzie. And so on... Hopefully enough of it will lodge in the brains of a middle schooler that they will feel a familiarity when reading the Brontë sisters' works later on. Goal accomplished!

In conclusion, this book and its plot structure and language are everything I love about Cat Valente's writing. I'm not sure it's a read-alone children's book, though, even for Middle Grade children. So I hope enough grownup readers will share it with their children to help it gain the appreciation it deserves. It's truly the perfect family reading night book.

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