I often find Catherynne M. Valente's work difficult to categorize (unless "Can I read it NOW?" counts as a category). I tend to conceptualize books based on what I read them for - fun characters, well-built fantasy world, interesting philosophical science-fiction, entertaining writer, and so on. But Valente doesn't really fit in to any of those mental maps. I mean, her stories are lovely, but tied up in the fact that her stories, as stories, WORK is the way that she weaves words together into a kind of poetry. Her language is almost spellbinding; it does that thing that I always want fantasy to do - catch you up in itself and make everything seem more vivid, more bright, more perfect. (If anyone has ever read Elaine Scarry's "Dreaming by the BooK", Valente does that thing that Scarry talks about where she uses colors and descriptions of light and opacity to make the images appear before your eyes...I think I've just written a review aimed at the audience of myself.)
Anyway, Valente is one of those authors who I can't help but read, but don't know how to recommend. Books with beautiful language! Books with gorgeous mythic imagery! Books that you don't want to put down because you're worried they're not real and might disappear when you're not reading them!
If any of those speak to you, try this book.