composition write about a trip to the fairyland how did you go there what did you see was it fun or scary
Answers
Explanation:
If you grew up on good-girl stories, like I did, you might be a bit wary of Fairyland at first. If you took those lessons to heart, certain that being good and true and kind was the best road to getting chosen for a magical quest, you might be taken slightly aback when the Green Wind comes to September’s window and says: “You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child.” When he asks if she would like to come away with him to Fairyland, she skips right over the part where he says he will deposit her in the sea:
“Oh, yes!” breathed September
Ill-tempered and irascible! These aren’t traits that generally earn you a trip to a magical land, unless you count that time Eustace Scrubb got swept along to Narnia with his cousins—and he had to learn his lesson eventually. But what makes September these things? Is she these things, at least the way we think they mean? She’s ill-tempered because she is unsatisfied, because she wants more. At twelve, there’s so much more to want. What the Green Wind calls irascibility is September’s interest in things, her curiosity. She is one of us—us book-readers, us mythology-seekers—and she knows what it means to be carried away to another world.
It means a story, and she wants that story with all her bookish heart. And though, in Valente’s sly narrator’s words, children don’t have hearts, September is 12, and thus only “Somewhat Heartless, and Somewhat Grown.” What drives her first adventure is the conflict between self-interest and a bigger kind of love.
From the start, September’s adventure is full of astonishingly playful, magical language; entering Fairyland is a bureaucratic tangle of Persephone visas and arcane rituals, and when she finally lands on its shores, a series of choices awaits: Which road to take? Who to trust and who to fear? And what to do? Being a child of stories, she takes on a quest. When she meets a pair of witch-sisters who are both married to a wairwulf, she agrees to get one witch’s Spoon back from the Marquess, the current ruler of Fairyland, about whom September has already heard a few things:
The Green Wind frowned into his brambly beard. “All little girls are terrible,” he admitted finally, “but the Marquess, at least, has a very fine hat.”
The Marquess is one of Valente’s greatest creations, and she lives in another: Pandemonium, the capital of Fairyland, which, in a bit of wordplay worthy of The Phantom Tollbooth, moves across the countryside according to the needs of narrative. When September meets The Marquess, she’s manipulative, wheedling, vicious and unpredictable. Both childish and wickedly smart, when she doesn’t get her way, she resorts to threats: September will go to the Worsted Wood and fetch what she finds in a casket there, or else.
But September will also have to stop the Marquess, or else, because the Marquess wants to separate Fairyland from our world forever, so no one ever has to miss Fairyland the way the Marquess did. This character in all her incarnations is her own version of the Three Fates: young Maud, who stumbled into Fairyland; grown-up Queen Mallow, who built a city out of cloth but fell back out again; and the Marquess, who clawed her way back and will not be sent home again, not ever. Her adult life was a prize she made for herself, and the rules of Fairyland took it away.
The first lesson of Fairyland is not entirely unlike the first lesson of Labyrinth: Nothing is ever quite what it seems. The Marquess is no villain, because villainy, straight up, is too simple for Valente, who hones in on the place where desires overlap and conflict and change. The Marquess is a different version of who September might have been: a young girl, a reader of stories, bearer of swords, whose story went down a different road. But September, being Somewhat Heartless, is young enough not to listen to her and to choose to do what she thinks is right.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated is all about choosing: The Marquess chooses to fall asleep, like any princess who needs time to stand still for her for a while. September chooses, like she has all along: to take up a quest. To take up a sword. To wrestle Saturday, her friend, who hates fighting people. But defeating him will give her a wish, and she can wish them all safe. It’s a terrible choice, but she chooses it.
And she still has to go home, or she will be no better than the Marquess, who would close off Fairyland to protect her own heart. She will also have to come back, like Persephone, every year. There’s always a catch to saying yes, and this is a good one: She has to come back. Even though she’ll grow up; she’ll care about other things and change and become a different version of herself. She has to come back. Not because she was chosen, but because she said yes.