Night’s Daughter is The Magic Flute (Mozart’s Opera), MZB style. It is a fantasy- sorcery, magic, and halflings abound, as well as the struggle between good and evil. Pamina, Tamino, Papagino, and Papagina discover their best selves, and learn to use all they were given to interact with the changing world around them.
I’ve never seen The Magic Flute, so I can’t compare it. Night’s Daughter was hard to get into. It started fairly slow, summing up great periods of time into a very short introduction. But it is soon captivating, and something I plan to read again, because I’m sure I missed so much. It’s a pretty nifty little story
Perhaps the best thing is the author’s note. MZB speaks about the difference between reality, science fiction, and fantasy. The quote in the ‘extended entry’ is from the author’s note, as I thought it was so cool.

I mentioned science fiction fandom above; there is a commonplace, facetious remark that “reality is a crutch for people unable to handle science fiction.” Some people, desperate for their preferred reading to be treated as “respectable”–that is, on a par with popular fiction about adultery in the suburbs–grow very angry when it’s quoted at them. But my favored reader is one who can read with his full awareness and does no need to be pacified by familiar setting or such characters as can be found on the street corner or in the soap opera of the mundane world.
So I like to go one step further and say that science fiction is itself a crutch for people unable to handle fantasy…In the words of Michael Straight, commenting of J.R.R. Tolkien, “Fantasy does not obscure, but illuminates, the inner nature of reality.”
(Remember that I’ve picked out some of the author’s note, not all of it, nor even the most important parts. Just some support for my own love of reading.)