OK, I'm staying with the 'Wayward Children' series for now, because I wanted to see where Seanan McGuire was going to take it after her approach change in 'Down Among the Sticks and Bones'. I'm still reeling from the ideas thrown out by the first book, 'Every Heart a Doorway', which is surely a strong challenger for my top ten of all time. It still boggles my mind that McGuire, whose work I've consistently enjoyed, could knock it out of the park so effortlessly and do it within novella length. Perhaps because the first book did that so much, its first sequel focused massively, diving into the back stories of a couple of characters we already knew than taking the series forward.
And that's fine and 'Down and Among the Sticks and Bones' is another excellent read, but I always wanted to know more about the mythology that McGuire created, to expand rather than to focus. I want to know where the magical doors come from that open for children who don't fit where they were and need somewhere to belong. How do they know? Is there a wizard behind the curtain? Is a structure discernible so that they can be managed? If they can be opened, as the majority of those stuck back at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children dearly want to do, how can they do that? If that's possible, are they connected and can they be navigated? I have so many questions.
McGuire may not answer much of that here but she does begin the process. Yes, these worlds with their wildly different logic and rules of physics are, or at least can be, connected. Yes, ways exist to navigate them, even if the only one provided here is a deus ex machina, a magic solution to what I don't want to believe is a magic problem, one that arrives out of nowhere and is taken away again before it can become a permanent tool. It's a bracelet that enables travel between worlds, and it was easily my least favourite aspect to book three.
My favourite is that, even though I felt that the mechanism was a bit of a cheat, at least there was a mechanism and that meant that the characters who start out at Eleanor West's Home soon find their way elsewhere. The reason is that Sumi, murdered in the first book, had a daughter while in her land of Confection and that daughter is literally fading away because Sumi hasn't returned, as prophecied, to overthrow the Queen of Cakes. This daughter is Rini and she falls out of the sky into the turtle pond behind the Home, seeking her mother.
Here's where nonsense comes in very handy indeed, because Sumi is dead and can't return to her land to fulfil the prophecy, but that's only according to our logic, which only applies in our world. It falls to a group of students to dig up her skeleton, restore her hands, then put the magic cheat to good use to travel to the Halls of the Dead to see what can be done to go further. And so we go, on of course to Confection to see what can be done about Sumi and Rini and the Queen of Cakes.
While I enjoyed the deep dive into the back stories of two specific wayward children in 'Down and Among the Sticks and Bones', that approach didn't allow for much of a look at diversity, which is a key theme in this series, almost as important as belonging. Every character sent to the Home is a soul out of place, someone who belongs somewhere other than where they are and isn't accepted as their true selves until a door opens as a sort of fix to a cosmic mistake. They're all used to being different and not accepted. After returning to our everyday world and sent to the Home, they find acceptance but they're still different and that's such a deep concept to explore.
My favourite aspect to this book was the interaction between the wildly diverse characters tasked with getting Sumi back to Confection. Christopher is a dark character because he's waiting for his Skeleton Girl to bring him home. He can do dark things and they're totally normal to him. Nancy is dark too, because she works as a statue in the Land of the Dead, but she's different to Christopher in most other ways, just as both are different from Jack and Jill, the subjects of book two.
The others all have darkness to them, but are much lighter by comparison. Kade used to be Goblin Prince in his world and he could easily be considered the most rational character of the bunch, not least because he's currently Eleanor West's assistant headmaster. Nadya is a Drowned Girl who's much more at home with turtles than humans. However, she does bond with new girl Cora, who's a mermaid, even though she's considered to be overweight by human standards.
All of them are good characters, but what I found most fascinating was how different they were to each other, not just from our perspective but from their own. Sure, they all share a core similarity in them being misfits who journeyed to their own worlds but, for whatever reason, then returned to ours. However, they're far more different from each other than we are from the people who we might consider different. There are always barriers. Cora is at home in salt water, but Nadya lives in fresh water. Nonetheless, they find far more in common through being from water worlds than inherently apart and that's the key lesson here. Nobody really gets Christopher and he freaks out his friends more than once but they accept him anyway and appreciate his talents. Acceptance is everything.
And that's not just other people but ourselves too. Many may find Cora's habit of connecting every moment to how she was bullied for being fat repetitive and annoying, but it's real. This is trauma. She's back in a world that bullied her and she constantly expects certain actions and words, even if they don't come. It'll take a long time to ditch that mental muscle memory and much of that is her need to put her happiness in her own body first. The same goes for Nadya, who was born with one arm and whose history with a prosthetic is mixed. These themes are deep ones and I find that the real value comes not while reading this book, or its predecessors, but in letting it hang out in our brain and percolating.
I enjoyed this book. Initially, it felt more like a sequel to the first than 'Down Among the Sticks and Bones' did, but I had a bunch of issues with it. The more I thought about those issues, the more I'm realising that they aren't issues at all, merely starting points for internal discussion. The only one that hasn't found itself rationalised away and then turned from a negative into a positive through discovering the right way to look at it is the magical bracelet. It's still a deus ex machina and it still feels like a cheat. However, I'm also open to it being a first hint at something new that will deepen in future books. I'm very interested to see how I'll see it after the fourth book and the fifth and... ~~ Hal C F Astell
