The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Cover of the first edition of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Author	Catherynne M. Valente
Cover artist	Ana Juan (jacket illustration), Rich Deas (jacket design)
Country	United States of America
Language	English
Genre	Fiction, Novel
Publisher	Feiwel & Friends Constable & Robinson
Publication date	May 2011
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	256 pages
ISBN	(hardcover)
OCLC	670481840

Fairyland is a series of five fantasy novels by Catherynne M. Valente. It follows a 12-year-old girl named September as she is spirited away from her average life to Fairyland.

In Valente's previous novel, Palimpsest, the narrator briefly discusses a book that one of the characters read as a child, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Valente then began a book by that title as a crowd-funded project and published the story online. The book was later picked up by Feiwel & Friends (Macmillan Publishers) for traditional publication. It is published in the UK by Much-in-Little (Constable & Robinson). Valente has stated that Fairyland will be a five book series.

On July 27, 2011, a short prequel was published as an e-book by Tor.com, and is available to read there.The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While features an opening illustration by Ana Juan, and tells the story of the young girl who became Fairyland's evil Marquess.

Published in May 2011, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland was written before the prequel, but set after it. In this book, 12-year-old September has her first adventure in Fairyland.

An unseen narrator relates the story of September, a twelve-year-old girl from Omaha, Nebraska. September's father is a soldier at war in Europe and her mother works all day building airplane engines in a factory. One day a Green Wind visits her and she accepts his offer to take her to the great sea that borders Fairyland. September meets a gnome who gives her the ability to see Fairyland as it truly is before pushing her into that world. September's adventures continue in Fairyland, where she meets witches who give her a mission to steal a spoon back from the Marquess, who rules fairyland with an iron fist. She teams up with A-Through-L, a wyvern who believes his absent father to have been a library and thus considers himself a "Wyverary", a wyvern and library hybrid. When they find the Marquess, she hands over the witches' spoon in return for September's promise to retrieve a special sword from a casket in the Worsted Wood. September meets Saturday, a marid, and with A-Through-L they head for the Worsted Wood, where September finds the casket. The "sword" inside varies depending on the interests of the finder's mother, so September found not an actual sword, but a wrench because of her mother's work as a mechanic. As September escapes the Worsted Wood with the wrench, Saturday and A-Through-L are kidnapped and she sets about finding them. She must circumnavigate Fairyland in a ship of her own making to land at the Lonely Gaol, a jail at the bottom of the world. Along the way, she befriends a one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old paper lantern named Gleam, who helps to guide September to the Lonely Gaol. Once there, she learns the Marquess's full story and that she wants September to use the wrench to permanently separate Fairyland and the human world. September refuses and frees her friends from the Gaol. She uses Saturday's marid powers to wish everything well again, just before her time in Fairyland runs out—until the next spring, when she is bound by law to return.