It seems a little odd to suggest that I've occasionally had my doubts about the 'Wayward Children' series of novellas, given that I've rarely felt so good about and so affected by a series in my life. It may be that it connected with me so emphatically from the outset that I felt I knew where it might be going but I was wrong and that felt weird because I'm in this series and so are plenty of people I know, even though Seanan McGuire hasn't met most of them. It's that affecting.

I liked the second novella, 'Down Among the Sticks and Bones', but it was a story focused on a pair of characters and a single sweep, rather than one that opened every door in the world on a special new universe. With each further entry, McGuire expands the borders of that universe and here, in a direct sequel to 'Down Among the Sticks and Bones', she expands the borders of the Moors with magnificent effect. It's the best 'Wayward Children' book since the first one and its only problem is that it's a novella.

'Every Heart a Doorway' was a perfect novella, because it introduced everything and opened up a vast realm of possibilities, while somehow managing to wrap up a story within novella length. It's clear to me that everybody who read it and knew that they were in it, an army of misfit toys whose personal uniquenesses had never showed up in a book before, promptly wrote the next chapter in their own lives, so that McGuire's second volume was only one of thousands. It worked as a novella too and I can't imagine 'Beneath the Sugar Sky' as a novel, but this one finally feels too short, as if it's an excellent novella but could have been an even better novel at twice, maybe three times the length. I want to know so much more about this world, which is so much richer here than last time I set foot there.

This one's about Jack rather than Jill but, when she shows up unannounced through a magical door into her former basement at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children, she's inside Jill's body. Nothing in the Moors is simple. It seems that Jack murdered Jill at the school in order to stop her murder spree, but then took her back to the Moors to resurrect her, because lightning is different there and Jack is a mad scientist. However, Jill, upset that her Master cannot transform her into a vampire now that she's dead, orchestrates an assault on Jack's windmill laboratory, murdering her mentor Dr. Bleak and stealing his skull. Now Jack needs help from her former classmates to answer this challenge, retrieve the head, resurrect Dr. Bleak and restore balance to the Moors.

So, as Sumi says, it's a Tuesday. One of the many things I adored about this book is that Sumi, who's as out of place in the Moors as anyone could possibly be, being a colourful confectionery creation, is perfectly placed to be our avatar there. She knows she'll return to Confection because she has a daughter to conceive and, given that we've met her already, we're on board with that. So she has zero fear and skips through the nightmare landscapes of the Moors blissfully free of concern. This allows her to serve as an interpreter, not only with sign language for Jack's beloved, Alexis, who's frequently out of voice, having been resurrected not once but twice already, but to everyone else. She's a rapier slicing to the heart of everyone and everything and it's wonderful to behold.

This is a quest novel, as was 'Beneath the Sugar Sky', even though quests break one of the primary rules of the school. Jack and Alexis go back to the Moors, of course, but they take a few students to help and it's fascinating to watch them react to someone else's home. The Moors are too dark for Christopher, even though he's too dark for most people at the school, being in love with a Skeleton Girl. Kade is a Goblin Prince in Waiting and knows that there are goblins in the snowy mountains in the distance who would know him. Sumi is bulletproof, of course, but Cora, the mermaid, is quickly called to the roiling sea by the Drowned Gods beneath it. They call so clearly that she runs for it in no time flat.

I should pause here and reiterate that the 'Wayward Children' series is all about belonging. Jack's not just concerned about the balance of power in the Moors because Jill has the upper hand. She's concerned that she'll go mad because she's OCD and the body she's currently inhabiting is wrong, even though her sister is an identical twin. She hasn't treated it the same and she's done horrible things with it and Jack has to constantly struggle to cope with it, more than Christopher struggles with living in a body that has flesh, period. There's a glorious moment when Jack tells Kade that he wouldn't understand what it's like living in someone else's body. Kade merely raises his eyebrows, because he's trans, a boy born into a girl's body, and Jack shuts up. Sumi recognises Jack, even in a different body, even though everyone else recognises Jill's physical form.

The series goes far beyond dysphoria, of course, to all sorts of belonging. Every one of the children at the school has a home that's theirs, but isn't the one they were born in. Cora is called by the sea in the Moors and welcomes it because it's weird breathing air, but it's not her sea. It's more right than anywhere else she's been since she was home, but it's still not home. Only Sumi, knowing she will survive and leave, is able to transform her worldview to match her location. She sees the moon in the Moors as "like the sugared cherry on the biggest murder sundae in the whole world."

And I should point out that, while I thoroughly enjoyed this from the standpoints of characters and story, I kept being stolen away by the phrasing. Sure, the characters are old friends now and they're beautifully delineated here, every one of them feeling more and more like puzzle pieces waiting to be slotted into place as the series runs on. The doors may not open often but we feel that they may well find theirs and make it home, even if it's a number of books from now. Sure, the story does its job and is careful not to leave any loose threads hanging that aren't going to be addressed later. But the phrasing is particularly glorious this time around.

Seanan McGuire has always had a magnificent turn of phrase, often cutting through everything to find the heart of a moment just like Sumi does here, but she outdoes herself in this book, hurling out description after description that seems to be only a vague attempt at that on the surface but is actually the sharpest and truest insight underneath it. I can't pick a favourite, honestly, but it's hard to top Jack's description of the Moors as a place where "science is always the question, and the answer is always and eternally 'yes'". That one phrase does a job that a thousand words might struggle to match.

This magical prose extends to the dialogue, which is so priceless that I had to stop reading often to just roll it around in my mouth. Jack describes werewolves as having "too many teeth to be safely argued with." Sumi likes new things. "New things are the best kind of magic there is. I can't waste time being afraid when there's newness to roll around in, like a dog in a puddle of syrup." Support is provided to Jack with a simple "Don't worry, we'll still love you after you kill your sister." Alexis, Moors-born, provides her experience in life: "Second resurrections aren't the easy things people want to pretend they are."

And I should shut up before I find myself writing more words than the actual novella contains, with one last line of description, in which McGuire talks about Gideon, the very young high priest of the Drowned Gods, who joins Jack's quest: "He rode with the comfortable ease of someone who knew that the most terrible of potential fates was in front of him, aimed at someone else."

I'm rather happy that I read this at the end of a month, right before deadline time, because then I can dive straight into book six of a series that's the gift that keeps on giving. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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