I grew up reading the copy in the Cambridge Public Library, which was for years the only copy I had ever seen, and I really love it. It is full of shipbuilding and the living signs of the zodiac. Its deep sea is deeply strange. Every now and then its reinvention of Fairy does edge toward the twee, but then you get something like the cloud-ships or the Minstrel Swan or the adults around whom the child protagonist has spent all her life turning out to be as real and complicated people as she is herself and I can forgive a name like "Flutterloves."
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I grew up reading the copy in the Cambridge Public Library, which was for years the only copy I had ever seen, and I really love it. It is full of shipbuilding and the living signs of the zodiac. Its deep sea is deeply strange. Every now and then its reinvention of Fairy does edge toward the twee, but then you get something like the cloud-ships or the Minstrel Swan or the adults around whom the child protagonist has spent all her life turning out to be as real and complicated people as she is herself and I can forgive a name like "Flutterloves."