#Review - Mislaid in Parts Half Known by Seanan McGuire

Mislaid in Parts Half Known (Wayward Children, No 9) 
Seanan McGuire
Tor, HB 20 February, e-book 9 January, audio 9 January
Source: Purchased
ISBN(HB): 9781250848505

I purchased this book as an audio. I will also buy the hardback once that's available, as, while the audio is empathetic and engrossing, I think that the Tor hardbacks of these stories are just beautiful objects to own (and as short books, they use little shelf space!)

Of all the Wayward Children stories so far, Mislaid in Parts Half Known is I think the most direct continuation, picking up Antsy's story from Lost in the Moment and Found more or less where it was left, with Antsy's arrival at Eleanor West's School. As such, it suits reading out of sequence much less than some of the other parts of the series - not only because of spoilers but because the previous book has established Antsy's character, rooted in her terrible experiences and in the betrayal she suffered from her adopted friends in her world-hopping Store. All of those things matter when a nine year old girl in a teenager's body tries to fit in at a school already full of misfits, and they affect how Antsy's very special gift - of being able to find anything - will be seen by those who, more than anything else, want to find their Doors and return to their own adopted worlds.

As with several other of the books in this series, these pressures force Antsy - still basically a nine year old, this bears repeating - into making some very subtle moral judgements and decisions about those who are older and ought to be wiser than her. The whole of McGuire's endlessly fascinating universe is like that, of course. The School is predicated on the existence of diversity, the different worlds from which the Wayward Children have returned representing that diversity, but it highlights a paradox because it brings together those who would rather inhabit their own, less diverse worlds, worlds that call to something distinct inside each of them. (Mine, I'm sure, would be the Moors). 

This tension produces some fascinating dynamics and calls the kids to balance their desire for their one, true and only world with care and love for their very different friends, against a backdrop of their necessary accommodation with a harsh and uncaring primary world (Earth) that doesn't understand any of them. Not all of them pass the test: some may come to this with further experience, some may not. 

While these themes recur in the series, the contradiction is, I think, especially acute for Antsy, possibly because "her" world was a nexus, a hub with many connections, and she was abused by those she trusted, at considerable cost. For her, then, the fantasy landscape has darkness at its core. It's not just the losing of the desired world that has hurt her, it's the core experience of it. How she resolves that and redeems herself and her world is the heart of the story, and it is a beautiful and revealing story which I loved to read.

There is, though, more here - we see alliances and authority in the school shift and Eleanor, that rock, seems to be crumbling somewhat. The School isn't static, and these books continue to explore and develop new themes and challenges. Roll on Book 10!

For more information about Mislaid in Parts Half Known, see the publisher's website here - 

#Review - Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

Lost in the Moment and Found
Seanan McGuire
Macmillan/ Tor/ St Martin's Press, 21 February 2023
Available as: HB, 160pp, e, audio
Source: Audio subscription
ISBN (HB): 9781250213631

Apologies that I haven't given clear publisher details above - frankly, even eight books in, I'm still rather hazy about the identity of the publisher, or whether Lost in the Moment and Found is officially published in the UK at all. (It is certainly available as audio, which is how I read it).

Even after eight books, and several shorts, McGuire continues to break new ground with these stories. Lost in the Moment and Found is the story of Antsy, a young girl who, early on, seems in real peril from an adult. I don't want to spell out the nature of this, and would refer readers to the author's note - but I will say that McGuire handles the issue with great delicacy, never spelling out in the text what may happen but making it totally clear that someone here is trying to cross lines that ought not to be.

Anyway, long story short, Antsy is threatened and runs away. And she finds a Door. Readers of this series will know that Doors can lead to some wonderful places and take people to worlds that will welcome them, worlds they will fit with - but Antsy doesn't need a whole world, does she, she just needs a safe place where lost things such as her can be cherished?

That need perhaps takes us deeper than we have yet been into what I might call Doorology - the principles and workings of the Doors - why they appear (or don't), where they go - and the cost of using them. There have been some hints of that, but not, yet, a full account. Perhaps this still isn't a full account, but we do learn a lot, as does Antsy. It's frustrating to be writing this review because I don't want to give away all the magic, but I will say that this story raises questions about Doorology as well as providing answers and shows that things can go wrong, especially where fallible adults take a hand.

Antsy is especially raw where fallible adults are concerned and I have to say, my heart almost rose to my mouth when I understood the situation that she gets into here. Reading some of the earlier books I've been tempted to think, count me in, when one of Wayward Children finds their world (mine would be The Moors, or course). Lost in the Moment and Found presents a much darker take That corrective was probably due - it's too easy to think that everything will be write if you only step into the right world. I think McGuire's message has always been a bit subtler than that, to be fair, but Lost in... addresses this aspect the most clearly of any so far. I think.

Which is not to say it isn't fun. It's fun! There is wonder! There is joy! Like all these books, there are several levels of meaning, and simple, mischievous, childlike (NB childlike, not childish) amazement is part of the package too.

And while standalone, there are also callouts to the other boys, and eventually, a like of coming-home-but-not that promised more of Antsy and perhaps hints that some of those unresolved questions will be revisited and, er, resolved.

For more details about Lost in the Moment and Found here is the US Macmillan page for the book.

#Review - Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire

Skeleton Song (Wayward Children)
Seanan McGuire
Tor.com, 2 November 2022
Available as: e  
Source: Purchased
ASIN: B0BK6J3FFM

 

Skeleton Song fills a gap in McGuire's Wayward Children series, which studies - with great compassion - the lives of you g people who are out of place in "our" world, finding their fulfilment in various fantasy lands reached through magical portals - but who then are returned to this world, and left to work through that rejection. 

In many of the stories we have met Christopher, who found the love of his Skeleton Girl but - somehow - stumbled out of her world and madly, desperately, wishes to return. What test did he fail, what task did he find, that separated him for her?

Well, here we get some answers. We learn about the monstrous being that comes to Mariposa. We learn about Christopher's illness and his healing, and the origins of the bone flute. We learn about the price of love, and the grief that the price brings. It's a short and simple story but no less moving for all that, and it sets us up, I hope, to learn more of Christopher;'s and Skeleton Girl's story in some forthcoming book.

As ever, McGuire's prose is masterly, maintaining the story in a delicate banalise between high fairytale, dream and human - if that's the correct word when the humans include living skeletons - practicality and reason. Finishing these books always gives me that sense you get when you wake form a really good dream and you want to go back to sleep to recapture it - bit you know you can't. A distant echo perhaps of the grief and loss that McGuire sees in her young people on their return from the lands that have rejected them?

Strongly recommended if you're following these stories, if you are not then go and read Every Heart a Doorway first, you'll thank me, I promise!

For more information about Skeleton Song, see the publisher's website here.

Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children, 7)
Seanan McGuire
Tor.com, 4 January 2022*
Available as: HB, 160pp, audio, e
Source: Audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9781250213624

*US date, from Tor website. I think e and audio dates are the same for UK - and indeed I was able to obtain the audio - but based on information from my friendly local bookshop, I don't think the HB is available in UK until February. While I enjoyed listening to the book, this is a series I HAVE to have on my shelves so my preorder for the hardback is in!

Where the Drowned Girls Go picks up Cora's story. We have met Cora before in the Wayward Children series but she hasn't had her own book yet. Cora, bullied for being "fat", found liberation when she was thought to have drowned, but instead lived as a mermaid in The Trenches. We're only told little bits of her life in the Trenches, but it was clearly a full life, a good life, a brave life. On her return, she joined Miss Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children from which she went on quest with some classmates to rescue Sumi. 

That involved a trip to The Moors, where Cora came to the attention of the Drowned Gods - which still watch her and haunt her dreams. Desperate to escape their attention, Cora seeks out a different institution, one that will take the magic out of her. The Whitethorn Institute operates on different lines from the Home for Wayward Children. Designed to fit its students for this world - the only one that matters - it is, as Cora soon realises, a crueller place, but - she still tells herself - a necessary one, for her.

Here come all the misfits, the odd children, those who are something the world won't accept. Here they will be compelled, compresses, converted, so that they can take their place again as ordinary, unexceptional, compliant humans. 

Or die trying. 

This is a rather different book from the earlier parts of the series. It's both more capital-R Realistic, and darker. It's also, on the face of things, much less magical. The key action here (indeed, nearly all of the action) takes place in our world, and the central events follow Cora at her new school and in particular her relationship with her new fellow pupils and teachers (mostly women referred to as "matrons" and though there is also a distinctly unpleasant and creepy Headmaster).

That action is less about falling into a magical world and trying to survive, or to get back to this one, or to find that true home again after losing it, that about the dilemma of fitting in in a truly hostile environment. It's therefore in many ways the antithesis of the series to date, the tension sustained by Cora's growing understanding of her situation and her continual debate with herself: is all this justified, worthwhile, helpful to her in getting rid of those stalky Drowned Gods?

McGuire avoids being didactic about this. This world, our "real" world, in a place of messy compromised and of getting by. None of us can know what it means to Coral to be surveilled by her Drowned Gods, who visit her in her dreams and make her afraid to sleep. None of us can know whether or not escaping them may be worth being untrue to to herself - what even is "herself"? Yet at the same time the whole setup of the Whitethorn is deeply troubling, clearly very prone to being read as a metaphor for, at best, a misconceived system designed to keep its victims in various closets, at worst, as one for various forms of conversion "therapy" with all the accompany damage that implies.

There are other elements of darkness here, too, but I'll say no more about them.

So the horror and jeopardy in this book is less fantastical and more mundane, and therefore, more intense and troubling that some high adventure in the land of Confection or lonely trip to the Moors. There is a distinct sense that the party's over and the bills about to be paid: being away form Eleanor West's School, which at least attempts to provide some mitigation and understanding, shows how threatening the world really is for these young people who know they don't belong. 

This change in tone is probably an inevitable evolution of the series. It's one which means some readers may find Where the Drowned Girls Go rather a different book from the previous ones, but it opens the stories, I think, to showing new occasions for resistance, for solidarity and for courage, which these stories have always been about. It creates a richer, more complex canvas, perhaps, and I'll be interested to see what McGuire creates next on that canvas. 

For more information about Where the Drowned Girls Go, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Across the Green Grass Fields
Seanan McGuire
Tor.com, 14 January 2021
Available as: HB, 176pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN: 9781250213594

Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series is one of my firm favourites, so I was pleased and honoured to have the opportunity to read Across the Green Grass Fields early via a free advance e-copy from NetGalley. 

Across the Green Grass Fields is a stand-alone book in the series, focusing on Regan Lewis, a young girl, and later woman, who is desperate to be taken as normal. There is no overt reason, to begin with, why she shouldn't be seen as 'normal' but McGuire writes as ever with real insight into young peoples' lives (yes, I know writing "young people" marks me as ancient but there we are). In this case, the insight is into that child-growing-up anxiety, bound up with being in and out of friendship groups, in which 'normal' isn't so much a state of being as a state of grace. Not to be normal is to be cast into the outermost darkness and Regan sees that happen to a friend when Laurel, queen of her little circle, excommunicates Heather. Not wanting to suffer a similar fate, Regan's development is bent towards staying in favour. Even if Regan's mother assures her that there are many valid ways of being a girl, Laurel's narrow worldview still prevails.

All of which sets Regan up for a terrible fall when she can't, in the end, stay within the boundaries that Laurel draws - sending her fleeing, as Wayward Children must, into a world that welcomes her. For Regan, a keen horsewoman, this is the Hooflands, a world of centaurs, unicorns, kelpies, hippogriffs and other equine beasts. As you'll know if you have read other books in this series, it is not, though, a safe world, it is not a world of cosy wonders. There are real dangers and challenges here and humans are seen as bringing crisis and change to the Hooflands. There must be a reason for Regan's coming, and while she bonds immediately with foal Chicory who becomes the true friend she never had among other humans, there's a sense of doom having over things from the beginning.

McGuire's writing in this series always has great heart and generosity, exposing hypocrisy and bigotry - whether in the human world or through one of those doorways - mercilessly but also respecting and celebrating friendship and love. Across the Green Grass Fields is no exception, although the message is perhaps more subtle than in some of the previous stories. Ostensibly, Regan's story is a quest - she's a sort of Dorothy, definitely not in Kansas any more - but the real journey she's on is I think more one of coming to terms with, of learning to love, herself, 'normal' be bothered. We never actually see the culmination of that once Regan has sorted out the problems of the Hooflands, but in a sense it's not needed. We are told enough, and having read the preceding books, can fill in Regan's subsequent story and see how things will go and how she will arrive at Eleanor West's school (never mentioned in the book!) without having to be told any more.

In that sense, while completely standalone, this is also a book that should be opened after, at least, reading Every Heart a Doorway, and possibly one or two of the others - not because of particular spoilers, but because these slim, beautiful and true books are all really part of the same wider story and some background will help in understanding it. It's one story that celebrates difference, loyalty and growth, and I would strongly recommend Across the Green Grass Fields (and all the series) to you.

Review - Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

Jacket art by Robert Hunt

Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children, 5)
Seanan McGuire
Tor.com, 7 January 2020 (USA), 1 February 2020 (UK)
HB, 206pp.

I bought my copy of this book (I was lucky to find a shop selling it in late December).

I'm really enjoying McGuire's Wayward Children series. Eleanor West's Home [and School] for Wayward Children caters for the casualties of fairytales - the kids who've come back from a Wonderland, a Goblin Market, the Halls of the Dead or the Land of Candy, and find themselves unable to live in the "ordinary" world. At the School, they can complete their education in both mundane (maths) and potentially useful (how to treat wounds) subjects while waiting to see if a portal will appear to take them back to what they now thing of as home.

The whole thing is something of a metaphor for those kids who are - due to gender, sexuality, geekiness or whatever - ill at ease with their homes, their families, the judgemental world at large. McGuire delivers this with subtlety - while some of them are, indeed, gay or trans (or have issues with food or simply prefer to inhabit basements which happen to have autopsy tables and jars of pickled things) the burden of the kids' difficulties and of that judgy world is on their affiliations with The Moors, with the Drowned Gods or the Skelton world of Mariposa. That's why their parents have, with relief, accepted Miss West's offer of a place at the Home.

Over five (so far) books McGuire has been using this framework to explore the rights and wrongs of participation in such worlds, the comradeship that develops between the (very different) young people and the underlying dynamics of their families which have led to them preferring, say, life as a Mad Scientist dwelling on a lightning-racked hill to an existence as part of a middle-class, middle-American family. As I read these books, McGuire is offering enormous sympathy, enormous solidarity to those who feel judged, rejected, out of place, for whatever reason and indeed I find the sketches of what happened before - how a pair of twins may fall so out of sympathy with each other as to become deadly rivals, for example - as interesting as the fantasy narratives that follow. McGuire has, I think, a great insight into human nature, particularly into the dynamics of "strangeness", of not fitting in, and she writes with great empathy.

McGuire has also shown, though, (particularly in the last book, In An Absent Dream) that life in one of these other worlds isn't by any means a balm for all the problems one may face, that indeed things can go fearfully, dangerously wrong. Lundy, the hero of that book, isn't there in Come Tumbling Down to tell us whether such a life is "worth it" but we see the same question played out as a number of the characters we have come to know and, yes, love, go on quest to help one of their own. Come Tumbling Down is part of a sequence (with the first book, Every Heart a Doorway, and the second, Down Among the Sticks and Bones) which focuses on two sisters, Jack and Jill, who discovered, and lived for years in The Moors, a world of vampires, mad scientists and lightning-powered necromancy. Now Jack returns to the school seeking help, after her sister does something truly monstrous, and suddenly everyone must go to war - Kade, Christopher, even Sumi from the world of Confection (who proves in many ways to be the most ruthless and clear sighted of all).

I enjoyed this book. It's a fairly simple mission based story, albeit with some moral complexities, and I think really tops off the Moors sequence (previously left hanging) in a fairly neat and satisfactory way, though tempting some of our heroes along the way with a kind-of-OK solution to their spiritual homelessness. Might any of them accept living in The Moors as better for them than this world, our world, even if not exactly what they yearn for? The reader will hope they resist that temptation, but one can see that it is, truly, a temptation compared with the risk that a door to one's chosen world may never actually open.

I am though now desperate to hear something about Mariposa, where Christopher met and fell in love with the Skeleton Girl or the goblins of whom Kade is a prince or perhaps mermaid Cora's watery world. All these have been hinted at and I hope that, as McGuire has been happy to dot backwards and forwards in the timeline (the order the books take place in is actually 4, 2, 1, 3, 5), she will now give us origin stories for those characters (accepting that the books aren't really about the origins but the consequences, I would still like to know what made these kids fit those worlds, as we were shown for Jack and Jill).

There are also some developments at the Home/ School hinted at here, which I hope will also be explored so there seems to be a lot to keep this series going: five books in, it's anything but flagging!

Review - In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

In An Absent Dream (Wayward Children, 4)
Seanan McGuire
Tor.com, 1 February 2019
HB, 208pp

I reviewed In An Absent Dream as an audiobook (even though I've cited the availability of the hardback version above, probably because I fetishise the physical object or something, don't get me started).

The fourth volume in the Wayward Children series is actually a prequel, the events taking place a few decades before the other books. We enter the world of (Katharine) Lundy, an intense, studious girl who has no friends. It's the 1960s, and teachers can easily get away with saying things like, girls need more help with maths. Because her father is the Principal of her middle American elementary school, no-one wants to know her. It's all not fair, and Katharine longs for a world where things are fair and there are rules that everyone follows.

In the manner of the Wayward Children books, of course, she finds just that: a doorway leads her to the Goblin Market where everyone must always give "fair value". (To fail to do so would lead to an escalating series of changes and losses, eventually resulting in... well, I won't spoil that).

The story is bookmarked by two references. At the beginning is an extract from Christina Rossetti's bewitchingly enticing poem, also Goblin Market, stressing the ripeness, the juiciness, the taste, of all those fruits that are on offer. Towards the end, McGuire's authorial voice declares sadly that "this is not a fairy story". (I may slightly misquote, I listened to the audio so can't easily check the text).

It certainly isn't that sort of fairy story - you know, where the Princess and the Handsomse Prince kiss and live Happily Ever After. But I think McGuire's warning is slightly deceptive. That first quote has already given us some orientation as to what sort of (fairy) story the book is. Rossetti's poem may be interpreted as a sort of yearning warning to Victorian young womanhood against temptation, in the form of those oh-so-sweet goblin fruits, but there is more than one level of meaning to it and McGuire deftly exploits another that is a common theme of fairy stories - the bad bargain. Lundy (she chooses to use her surname after a warning that names have power) is told what the rules of the Market are, and soon learns the consequences of failing to keep them, but she is, as well as being a rule-taker, always on the lookout for loopholes. This leads her to (in a sense) gamble with the Market, the stakes becoming higher and higher. Whether that will ultimately buy her freedom and her heart's desire or... not... you have to read the book to see.

It's in some respects a curious book. Part of the Wayward Children series, it is very much a standalone, with little involvement of Miss Eleanor and her School.

Curiouser (and curiouser) still, the focus of this novel is very much on the progress of Lundy's bargaining and how that develops. We hear about high adventures - much Questing goes on, there is talk of defending the Market's borders and even a death of a friend of Lundy's - but this is all off camera, as it were with the book dwelling instead on Lundy's comings and goings, the tension between The Market, the world where she belongs (her "home") and our world, the world of her parents and sister. So we see a lot of her coming and going, with her life in the Goblin Market glossed over. That felt frustrating at times, you just have to trust McGuire though - in a sense we can imagine what we don't see, and putting all that in would make the book a lot longer and smother the theme she's trying to develop. Still, I would like to know more about those skipped over episodes.

Finally, I've referred above to bargaining, to "fair value" and the central metaphor of this book is a market. The Archivist, the nearest thing Lundy has to a guide and mentor in that strange world, is rather fond of lecturing her on the workings of that market. If you listen carefully (remember, I was listening, not reading) I think you'll conclude that this market is not a "market" in the sense that the modern neoliberal consensus would recognise (it's too fair for that; a Goblin Market is, after all, a fair, and so has to give fair value?) but it's still hard for these passages not to resemble economics seminars. And in at least one of them (which explained the background to Lundy's first big gamble) I never quite understood the reasoning. (Sorry this is obscure, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers). I think two things are going on here - first, since Rossetti's day, terms like "market" and "value" have become tainted by what is, after all, referred to as the "dismal science" and secondly, the ideas at the heart of this book are quite complex to convey in what is a short book.

That seems to have taken us a long way from fairy tales and magic doors. Rest assured, those are present here, it's really an enchanting extension to the Wayward Children series. Also present - of course - is Lundy, an engaging and steely young woman whose love, loyalty and courage shine through.

It is really a very enjoyable book, and confirms that McGuire is continually taking this series to new places. I hope she does so again soon.

For more info on the book see the publisher's website here.

Review - Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Cover by Sean Rodwell

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, 3)
Seanan McGuire
Tor, 1 February 2018
HB, e 174pp

Warning: this is the third book in a series and there are some spoilers below for earlier ones.

I bought my copy of this book (another 2018 book I'd left unread too long, and caught up with over Christmas).

I'm loving McGuire's Wayward Children series. To start with the concept is brilliant - Eleanor West runs the Home for Wayward Children, those who've wandered through doorways into other worlds, returned to this one, and don't fit in - but the execution, ah, the execution is sublime. These are real kids, people you will recognise or even people you might have been. Or indeed, be. This series is just so well written, has so much heart and soul and I really, really enjoyed this latest instalment.

Beneath the Sugar Sky opens out the themes of the series somewhat. While the first two books, Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones, told different parts of the same story - that of Jack and Jill, their time on the Moors and their time in the School - in Beneath the Sugar Sky, Rini - daughter of Sumi, who we met in Every Heart - appears from the land of Confection, a place of sugars and baked goods... where everything has now gone wrong. What happened in the earlier book has brought about a catastrophe. The Queen of Cakes is rising again, and Rini's very existence is threatened.

A party of friends sets out to put things right, travelling through various worlds, meeting the Lord and Lady of the Dead and then, inevitably, coming up against the Queen herself.

It's smart, funny, touching and has a pace and tension to it that will keep you turning the pages, as well as smart characters out of their depth - they're in a strange world, not one they would have travelled to. But there is more here and I thought that - after the third book - it might be worth saying something about this series in general.

I understand that one of the hallmarks of science fiction or fantasy is to make metaphors actual. I do find this a hard concept to grasp. I can see for example that "time travel" leaps over our short lives to consider the effect of what we do on the future - or pushes us into the past to consider how similar, and different, we may be to our ancestors. But it's hard to feel this idea other than as a clever talking point, it seems to add little to one's understanding of a book.

In the Wayward Children books, though, McGuire takes this idea and makes it dance and sing. her series has a very clear focus: the kids she conjures up literally don't fit into this (our) world. They want to find a world where they do fit and, if they fall back out of it - those doorways have a pesky habit of reopening just when you don't want them - they need to find their way back in. Eleanor West's Home is a kind of waystation, a safe space where such kids can wait and learn, while they hope to go back.

So we have here, for example, Cora, who's curvy and excellent at swimming and has spent time as a mermaid in a water world. Back home, though, she's taunted for being "fat". Or Kade, whose misfortune is to have been exiled from the world he really wants, where he would be a brave prince - because it identified him, as his parents do, as female. (Not every story has a happy ending).

The Home provides a place to wait, to hope that the door will eventually reopen and - however imperfect this is - the society of others who are in a similar position. It isn't all sweetness and light (witness what happened in the first book) but it is better than a disbelieving and, well, adult world.

The writing therefore speaks to the sense of many young adults that they are misunderstood, out of place, different and it holds out hope of a better future. But there are no promises. This acceptance has to count for a lot, the happy ending may not come (and don't many or even most of us adults go around with similar feelings at least some of the time?) Not every door reopens.

But it goes further than this. By positively identifying with a glorious gamut of diversity (the books acknowledge race, gender, sexuality and many more characteristics - including simply loners and those who identify as weird in various ways) McGuire subtly (well, perhaps not so subtly) renders people visible. In a sense the book is Eleanor West's academy, because that is the place that Christopher, Cora, Sumi, Nancy and all the others have gone because that is where they will accepted and acknowledged..

If that sounds like the worst dream of a certain sort of pallid, angry SFF fan, well, perhaps it is. But I think the reason for that is not because, oh look, here's a SFF book with LGBT people in it, or people of colour, or whatever, and why did she have to do that, and can't we just have a fantastical adventure anymore? No, I think what stands out is that these books don't just have a diverse range of characters, in passing as it were, rather their theme and purpose is that diversity. The whole point of Wayward Children is that with an un-diverse different cast of characters they wouldn't work. The central idea - that we all have, or may have, our own doorway, to a land where we make sense, that we can go there, but we can lose that place - only works on the premise that all those doorways are different. Narnia isn't Never Never Land. Wonderland and Nutwood are different places, even if they have similarities, and the Hundred Acre Wood, to which Christopher Robin escaped, different again.

McGuire's embracing of diversity makes this obvious and - I think - changes that metaphor of falling down the rabbit hole or stepping through a wardrobe forever, making clear that such fantasies, such quests, are about the child stepping into the pond, through the mirror, or into the crack in the tree rather than the ostensible business of the quest or adventure then that takes place. What need is inside someone that they travel to such places so that it can be recognised and met?

So - rather that a nod to diversity through including these characters, McGuire  has full-bloodedly turned it into the subject, the bedrock and the central metaphor of her book (of this series). It's an exemplary use of that 'make the metaphor concrete' idea, in the very best, most mainstream SFF tradition - but it turns this idea on something that, let's admit it, still gets a minuscule share of the action (or perhaps of the attention).

Oh, and in case I wasn't clear above, Beneath the Sugar Sky (as well as Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones) are rattling good stories. I don't think McGuire could produce a dud if she tried.

On, now, to Book 4, In an Absent Dream, which isn't out yet as a physical book (1 February if you're waiting!) but is available on Audible now...

Review - Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Jacket design by FORT

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, 2)
Seanan Mcguire
Tor, 2017
HB, 187pp

I'm continuing to review some books that have been on my shelves far too long, having taken the chance of a lengthy car journey to listen to the audiobook of Down Among the Sticks and Bones. (I bought a physical copy of this book from Wallingford Bookshop and the audiobook from Audible via Amazon. The audiobook, read by McGuire herself, is excellent, although Dr Bleak's signature whisper of a voice does at times make him a little hard to follow when driving!)

In this, the second part of her Wayward Children series, McGuire tells the other side of the story she began in Every Heart a Doorway (my review here). I won't say too much about that in case you haven't read it, but EHAD featured twins Jacqueline and Jillian - Jack and Jill ("because our parents shouldn't be allowed to name children") and their adventures at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children. Down Among the Sticks and Bones tells more about the two and about their time in the world known as The Moors, under the care, respectively, of the strange Dr Bleak and the commanding Master. It forms a whole with the earlier book and I think the two are best read together.

McGuire has written more recent books about the Home and the Wayward Children, but moving onto other characters and with a slightly different focus. Here, though, we have an almost clinical dissection of lives, of parenting and of the weight of expectations, the story going back to Jack and Jill's parents, Chester and Serena Wolcott. Despite a disclaimer that the story hasn't actually started yet, McGuire devotes nearly a third of the book to this complacent, insufferable pair, showing how their sheer conventionality, their refusal to admit wonder to their kids' lives, above all their sheer stuffiness, warps and forms the two girls, laying the foundations for what will occur after. There are perhaps shades of the Dursleys here though I think McGuire writes with much more psychological grip.

Indeed, she writes wisely throughout and shows, I think, a deep understanding of children: appropriately, the atmosphere reminded me of writers such E Nesbit and CS Lewis who - whatever their other failings may be - understand and glory in the differences between adults and children/ young adults, and take the latter seriously. This book is, McGuire is, on their side (something that shines through all the books in this series).

I'm not going to try and précis the book because it speaks for itself, but while telling an exciting story (you find a hidden doorway in your house and go through it to a world of monsters! A world of werewolves, vampires and mad scientists! A world where you can be yourself!) McGuire also teases out the damage done by expectations and just how hard that may make finding "yourself". While the Moors may ostensibly be a place of freedom from a certain sort of adulthood, there is Authority there and it happily, greedily, feeds on what is presented to it. So Jack and Jill are set on their way well before they cross that threshold, past that notice saying "BE SURE". The story thereafter is one of McGuire teasing out how the little faults and fractures between the sisters grow, are worked on by events and undermine their relationship, their unity, until... well, until things happen.

It's a short book - all of the books in this series are - and McGuire impressively draws on our knowledge of genre conventions to save having to spell out what could otherwise take a great deal of space. In a sense the Moors (like the others worlds visited by the Wayward Children) are narrative come alive, the book referencing films, novels, poems and art to give a much clearer impression of the place than mere words might but also to prefigure how things may go in the story. This saves a lot of explanation, yet the book remains novel, fresh and compelling.

After reading Every Heart a Doorway it's good to explore one of the worlds in more detail. In the next book, Beneath the Sugar Sky, McGuire develops this idea in a very different sort of world, also making a major theme of this series - diversity - more explicit.

But that's for another review: watch this space.

Review: Every Heart a Doorway

Every Heart a Doorway
Seanan McGuire
Tor, 2016
HB, 173pp
Source: Bought from Waterstones

This a brilliant book which I enjoyed immensely (as well as being very moved by it, both saddened and uplifted).

It is also I think the weirdest book I've read in a long time. (Which is great. Weird is good: long live the Weird!)

But - and I often find this with books I really loved - it's hard to know where to start in writing the review.

The plot is easy to summarise. Eleanor West runs a boarding school for survivors, children (mostly women and girls) who've come back after straying into other worlds - many of them Wonderlands of various types, some more... gothic. On return, of course, nobody will believe them and each pines for the life she enjoyed in a place attuned precisely to here.

Eleanor picks up the pieces.

To this school comes Nancy, lately returned from service to the Lord of the Dead. As if it wasn't already hard enough having parent who think she's off her head and having to fit in with girls who (mostly) seemed to have visited sparkly rainbow fantasy worlds, nasty things begin to happen after her arrival...

Yes, this book has plot, it has super plot. But the story isn't really about the plot. The heart of this book is very much the characters McGuire sketches and this is where I fear I won't be able to do justice to the book. It's a short book, but she makes each believable, rounded and - in their own way - both tragic and hopeful. There's Jack and Jill, the two girls who visited the achingly bleak Moors, inhabited by vampires and mad scientists. There's Kade, one of the few boys, who everyone used to think was a girl. he was exiled from his adopted world because that broke a rule: the others may hope to return, he never can. Sumi became accustomed in her world to high Nonsense and is really having trouble fitting in. Loriel found a home in a world of spiders.

It gradually becomes clear that all of these young people are traumatised, scarred by exile from places where they felt uniquely at home - many of them refer to their other worlds as "home" and most have been rejected pretty much by their families. Indeed, I think that they may have been alienated from their families before the strayed through those doorways to find refuge in a different place.

That is a pretty obvious metaphorical point here about people who are exploring their own identity, trying to find a life, a world, that suits them and cutting ties with family and home. It's emphasised by the presence of those who are different in other ways - the minority here who have a gothic outlook, longing for sweet darkness, stillness and quiet, those whose gender identity makes them different, those who are, simply, odd - and spelling it out perhaps makes it seem laboured. But in the book it's not. McGuire has whatever the writers' equivalent of green fingers is (inky hands?), displaying a sure touch with her characters and she makes this extended metaphor come alive, celebrating the glory of difference at the same time as she evokes the pain of knowing there is somewhere you fit in but not being able to get there.

While I don't think the idea of an "aftermath" for adults who experienced other worlds as children is a a new one - I'd point to Joe Hill's NOS4R2 or Alan Garner's Boneland as other examples and I'm sure there are more - Every Heart a Doorway is distinct in focussing on the phenomenon as though it applied to multiple young people, so enabling interaction between them, exploring the group dynamics of the situation, as it were. And it does so very well, touching on some fascinating issues (isn't it a bit, well, creepy for a teenager to want to go and serve as a living statue in the Halls of the Dead? Is she actually capable of making that choice? What would you be prepared to do to get back to that other place? How will you live if, like most of us, you know you can never reach it?)

I've rambled on enough. Read this. It will introduce you to some terrific characters and take you to very dark places. Parts are almost tear jerkingly sad. But, as I said above, it is also uplifting. Above all it is a real experience of a read. Strongly recommended.