If you were tasked with throwing just one genre label onto Seanan McGuire's multi-award winning 'Wayward Children' series, it would have to be fantasy. Sure, it often dips into horror, the structure behind it could well veer into science fiction and, at heart, it's general fiction, the eternal struggle for identity that's shared by all the best novels, whether written for children or adults, across the centuries. However, it's fantasy far more clearly and far more often than any of those others, even if its brand of fantasy has been 'Dracula' or 'Alice in Wonderland' far more than 'Lord of the Rings'.

This sixth book, however, is as pure and undistilled fantasy as the series has got thus far. There's no attempt to build the mythology of the series beyond adding a new character, Regan Lewis, who has no connection with Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children at all. She doesn't go there and not one character we know from there appears here. It's framed entirely separately, even if we can see that the first action in the sequel would be her parents delivering her to West's door. Sure, there's a quest, but it's hers alone.

Also, for a series that has spoken very deliberately and very specifically for characters who see the concept of normal as different to society's, in a variety of ways—size and shape, gender and sexual preference, any number of philosophical outlooks—it's also easily the most traditionally told. Sure, it's written in Seanan McGuire's recognisably fluid voice, but the story it tells could have been from the pen of Edith Nesbit and Regan is a "perfectly normal" seven-year-old girl when this begins. It's not quite that simple, I should point out, because we eventually learn something that brings Regan into the world of the different but even she doesn't know that to begin with.

Initially, she's just a girl who loves horses and that doesn't make her stand out in any way. "Loving horses didn't make her strange", McGuire states on page two and sets the stage for what will lie on the other side of the door that we know will open for Regan soon enough. Just as Anne McCaffrey looked at cats and horses, the traditional animals that Victorian girls were expected to fall in love with, and adapted them into fire lizards and dragons, McGuire looked at horses and adapted them into centaurs and unicorns.

Regan grew up as part of a little clique, a trio of best friends who hit it off in kindergarten and had all the things in common. Of course, it wasn't entirely perfect, because Laurel Anderson was their clique leader and so she set the defining boundaries around what was acceptable. Heather Nelson brought a garter snake to school in first grade and Laurel decreed it not acceptable. Girls don't like snakes, said Laurel, and that was that. Heather was out. Regan's parents point out that there's no right way to be a girl, a crucial line that we probably all fail to notice on a first read, and life moves on. Now it's Laurel and Regan, the normal girls who do what girls do.

It's only later that we realise what her parents truly meant. Regan realises that all the other girls are changing, as puberty strikes them, and she simply isn't. They're developing breasts and buying bras and deodorant and starting their periods and, well, she's doing none of those things. She's the same Regan she always was and so the conversation happens that her parents always knew would come from before she was even born. She has androgen insensitivity. She has XY chromosomes, not XX. She's intersex, even if she only has female parts. There's nothing wrong with her.

Now, take a wild stab in the dark how Laurel takes that news. Suddenly, Regan is different and she runs and finds her door and, just like that, she's in the Hooflands. Gone are her parents, her school and her horses. Instead, there's just her, plus unicorns and centaurs. In this world, the centaurs are the intelligent species and unicorns are just docile animals they herd, for all of the reasons that we herd cows. It happens that Pansy is the centaur who finds her and Pansy is part of a group who will nurture and teach and guide Regan, whatever she is, over the next six years.

After all, she's the only human anywhere in the Hooflands. She's inherently different. Nobody here either knows or cares if she's different from any other humans. She's just a human and humans in this world are special, even if, to her, centaurs are just people. Because humans are so rare in the Hooflands, they're the subjects of prophecies. Whenever a human shows up, they're seen as a hero to be in a story that they haven't written yet. The last time it happened, it was a boy and he helped Queen Kagami take her castle and throne back from the Kelpie King, before vanishing again, with Her Sunlit Majesty safely in charge. Now, Regan finds that she's destined to do something similar, an honour that she has little will to live up to.

It would be easy to just point out that this is my least favourite entry in the series thus far, because it is, but that would be misleading. It's still a worthy book and it does some of the things that all of the 'Wayward Children' books do, which is valuable and affirming. However, it's so traditional in its setting and progression that it fails to have much impact. It's not that it's the sixth book so far and the series has outstayed its welcome, because the fifth, 'Come Tumbling Down', was emphatically my favourite since the first one and I'm still eager to dive into numbers seven, eight and nine.

I've thought a lot about what it is that lessens it for me and I have a few ideas, but I'm not entirely sure yet. One possibility is that it's clearly a girl's story and I'm a boy. That may be partly true but I remember reading 'Misty of Chincoteague' as a kid and enjoying it, even if I was a boy who was into rayguns and spaceships rather than horses. Another is that it unfolds in a relatively simple manner. There's danger here, but it never feels particularly threatening, unlike every other entry thus far. i appreciate that Regan figures out the grand problem before trying to solve it, but it feels like she allowed the story to wash over her rather than framing it herself. There's inevitability here.

Above all, though, I think that the series has resonated with me so much because of how powerfully it looks at difference. It doesn't matter why any of these characters are different. We don't have to share their difference, just share that we are different in our own ways. This series continually tells us that there's a place where we will belong and we should always seek that out but, while we wait, the acknowledgement of our differences and the acceptance of them by our peers is crucial. When society won't provide that, we must offer fellowship to others who are different.

And that just doesn't happen here. Regan finds out that she's different, is rejected and runs, all in a breath. She finds belonging in the Hooflands, where the centaurs don't know or care that she's a particular sort of different. However, she never finds acceptance or acknowledgement in our world, because she's gone from it before that could ever happen and there's no time at the other end for her to find any. And that leaves 'Across the Green Grass Fields' a little empty to me. I wanted Regan to find that acceptance but, if it ever comes, it isn't in this book. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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