First Lines of Catherynne M. Valente's "Deathless"

"In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her."

- Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

I've read a number of Valente's books before - Palimpsest, and part of In the Night Garden - and while I've appreciated her artful and moving prose and imagery, I've been left cold by an issue I have with a lot of fantasy writing: the stakes don't feel real. The fantasy gets in the way of true pathos. I did not have that issue with Deathless.

I picked this up, honestly, because of Koschei the Deathless's amazing role in Mike Mignola's brilliant  Hellboy comics. But Valente transforms what in the original myth feels like a muscly thug, a simple cypher for imminent death, and turns him into a sympathetic figure, as someone who revels in his role but has not yet become it. And yet he's a strangely distant figure in the novel - most of the book focuses on Marya Morevna's entry into and exit from mythology. This is Valente's genius: she writes not only an updated retelling of the Russian myths in their amazing strangeness and complexity (for example, there's a Tzar of Birds here) but also comments on a meta level on myth-telling in general. It's an odd dance and I can't say that I understood it all - but the book was a hell of a journey and I enjoyed every minute of it.