[June 28, 2015] This was probably never going to be anything less than five stars. I love it, I'm invested, some of my favorite characters are here, and at the end of the day, Valente can tell us just about anything in the most beautiful language. She can make up any land and any creature and just brings it all to life with wit and clever phrases. I love reading these words so much, it's hard to hold anything else against them.

Each of her books seems to have a theme at the heart of them and as will be obvious to anyone reading, this third book is about growing up. I love, love books about growing up and coming of age stories, so I was totally enamored with it. Plus, we get the extra wonderful spin of both Saturday and September being people out of time. People who experience past, present and future all in a jumble. September grapples with who she will become and what fate means and if she has any choice or control in the matter.

My heart went out to Saturday in such a great way in this book. What a wonderful boy and excellent counterpart for September.

The middle bits did seem to amble along and sometimes, Valente seemed to lose the string of storytelling and fuzzy some of the main plot points. If you asked me to tell you about this book, I could more tell you about all the stops on their trip and who they met than the unifying main story line, though the ending was perfect and that I remember. September busted into Fairyland when no one came to get her, so it stands that she had an adventure unlike the two others we've seen. While this kind of scattered middle has caused some people to deduct a star or two, I cannot. The thrown about adventure and ambling about just prop up a story that is about the scattered and ambling process of growing up.

Maybe that's me giving it too much credit, but again, I was predisposed to love this to pieces.

I'm just so darn glad to have this series and a little sad to finish it soon and a little worried about having to wait for so long for the next one. But so it goes.

[April 28, 2016] Much of what I was thinking to share about this story I already talked about in the review above, so high five for past me. I will clarify that what I attributed to an ambling middle I would now call a fuzzy plot. I've got the general idea of what September was meant to do, adventure-wise, but it can become the slightest bit muddled, especially when it comes to action. Valente can kind of rush and over-describe her action so that you leave a block of text thinking, "I'm not entirely sure what just happened, but it sure was pretty!" If I could be objective about this book, I'd probably rank it a 4.5 stars primarily for this reason.

It does more than make up for it with the characters we meet. Tell me how Valente can make a better character out of an old car with a flower steering wheel than most authors can make their main characters. Everyone is so rich and lovely and every place has Lessons to Teach and Very Important Things to say and I just gobble that up.

I mentioned in my original review that I love stories about growing up and YES. Everything this book said about the confusion of trying to figure out who you are and how we spend a childhood growing a heart, only to have people tell us that being an adult means hiding it away was beautiful.

[April 15, 2020] Marking for reread.

[December 4, 2020] I started a reread of the whole series earlier in quarantine, but didn't make it all the way through, so I decided to come back to it before the end of the year. In April, I had pretty much the same experience with the story I always had, so I'm astounded that some very long and very short months later, I've found so much more to enjoy.

There are themes here about missing your friends that have to mean even more to me at the tail end of 2020. September and Saturday and El's heartaches about missing their friends felt so real to me, especially even as they are together, and still missing the time they've spent apart. Your friends grow up and change and go on adventures without you, and there is certainly a kind of ache in that, particularly as you see them changing without you. I loved that more than I ever had before.