Delia Sherman is a well-known editor and figure in the Interstitial Arts movement — one that aims to promote the art, music, literature, and combinations that fall in the cracks. The movement eschews genre for genre-bending, prefers uncategorizable to pigeonholed, and anything between to anything that is. She, along with her wife Ellen Kushner, have written several novels (separately and together) that aim to include and explore the ideas of the interstitial movement. Her latest work, a children’s fantasy novel, explores a lot of the ideas of Betweenness in many different ways.

Neef is a changeling — that is, she is a human who lives in New York Between. Her parents were given a fairy to raise many years before, and Neef has been living with her fairy godmother, a white rat named Astris. (Her fairy godfather is the Pooka, by the way.) New York Between is populated with all sorts of denizens of magical nature, from Stuart Little, who is obviously fictional, to moss ladies, characters from Japanese folk tales, and the Green Lady, who is the Genius of Central Park. (‘Genius’ meaning ‘local spirit’. There are Genii of most of the major places in New York.) When Neef is around eleven or twelve, she decides to have a bit of an adventure and take an alternate route on a routine errand. There, she finds out that there is an annual Solstice Dance that she is not allowed to attend, and it’s coming shortly. By dint of what she thinks is a drug to keep her awake, she manages to attend the Solstice Dance, unfortunately breaking a geas and sending her onto a three-part Quest to regain what she’d lost.

This book makes much use of traditional fairy tales — things coming in threes, a quest for the coming-of-age, the traditional fairy figures — but, as you might guess, skewers things slightly. Most books about changelings follow the fairy in the human world, rather than the opposite. Obviously, since the setting isn’t exactly pastoral, a large portion of the book is NON-traditional. I can’t think of a fairy tale in which the quester is asked to find tickets to a Broadway show, for example.

At the heart, this book is a love note to New York City. It starts out in Central Park, includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which would be a tad different if everything inside it were sentient), moves to New York Harbor (complete with mermaids and selkies), continues on to Broadway and Wall Street, and ends up back in Central Park. There’s obvious social commentary — Broadway, for example, is having awful problems because The Producer (the Genius of Broadway) has decided to automate everything with a computer. New York Harbor is having trouble with polluters. Wall Street has claimed a certain number of people who are stuck in jobs they aren’t suited to; they’d rather be artists, but they can’t leave the jobs. To be sure, in Changeling, they’re magical reasons, but there are obvious analogs to our world.

Neef apparently showed up first in a story called “CATNYP” that was in a collection entitled The Faery Reel, and I know I’ve read the story, but I can’t remember it. I think I can safely say that not having read this story will not affect your enjoyment of the book. She’s quite a bit of fun: spunky, obviously, but a lot of the humor in the story comes from how little she knows about the world outside of Central Park. Her questions about air conditioners are hilarious. The other characters are wonderful, as well — the Genii are fantastically representative; the Pooka spends a good deal of the time he’s on stage either drinking Guinness or trying to get it; and the Water Rat (another fictional character) steals the show for the few pages in which he appears.

I’m not a hundred percent sure what New York Between is, well, between. The ‘human’ world, certainly, but I don’t know what’s on the other side. I may, possibly, have missed something early on, and if anyone else wants to read the book and explain it to me, that’s fine, but it’s a fairly minor failing.

This book has some of the great characteristics of “Sesame Street”. No, wait — let me explain. I mean “Sesame Street” around 1990 — back when I was definitely too old to watch it, but that only made it better because I could finally understand the references and puns, like Polly Darton, Meryl Sheep, and Placido Flamingo. This book is great for middle-grade and YA readers, but older readers will see all the references to current and recent events (the aforementioned Broadway-computer issue) and other literature. I’m sure that many astute younger readers will understand a lot of these things, but they make the book all the richer for older readers. This book gets 5/5 stars.