I'm incredibly happy that Seanan McGuire kindly agreed to be our Author Guest of Honor this year at CoKoCon. She's an amazing writer, as well as an amazingly prolific writer, and somehow she just keeps on getting better. I've already reviewed a lot of Seanan's books for the Nameless Zine, but I still have more to read, including some entire series. At this point, I've reviewed thirteen 'October Daye' books, nine 'Incryptid' books, the first in her 'Ghost Roads' series and 'Boneyard', which was an entry into a third party series, 'Deadlands', after Jonathan Maberry and Jeff Mariotte.

So let's see which of her other books I can get through before CoKoCon in September, starting with this one, the first in her acclaimed 'Wayward Children' series which won the Hugo and the Nebula for Best Novella, among others, and another Hugo as part of Best Series last year. It's an absolute peach of a novella, unsurprisingly the beginning of a growing series, and it carries a serious punch because it only gets deeper the more you think about it. Individual lines jump off the page to take you into a thought spiral that leaves us emotionally affected. Many have clear parallels outside of fantasy and what's most powerful is that we can read those in so many different ways and so they resonate to our own personal uniqueness and identity.

The central conceit of the story is that children, usually girls, find doors and they go through those doors to any one of a slew of fantasy worlds. You've read this before in fantasy, of course, because it goes back at least as far as the 'Narnia' books of C. S. Lewis, which are referenced in the story as the clearest example, and probably much earlier. Like the children in that series, these grow and accomplish and suffer. They have grand adventures and do massively important things. They take time, maybe years, even lifetimes. And then, just as those children came back from Narnia, these children come back from their worlds and suddenly find themselves in their old bodies at their old ages living their old lives. It's brutal.

Phrase it like that and you can imagine the trauma. You've led armies, won crowns, slain dragons. You've grown up, grown old, grown tired. You've married and had children and their children have had children. And suddenly you're twelve years old again, with your parents fussing because they missed you so much and nothing feels right. You're not home. You're somewhere that used to be home when you were a different person, before your other life. Nobody understands who you are because nobody has been where you've been and done what you've done. They may love you and care about you but they don't know you. So you want to go back but you can't because your door is gone.

Enter Eleanor West and her Home for Wayward Children. It's a sanctuary for children who haven't got the option to go home, meaning their own unique worlds, but can at least spend their time in the company of those who understand. West looks sixty and is maybe forty years more than that but she's travelled through her own door. Simple acceptance and understanding are foundational to healing and to therapy, if that's needed as well. I didn't plan this to follow 'Castle Waiting', but it does the same job in a very different way and both books are refreshing.

Nancy is the primary character here, who travelled to the Halls of the Dead, danced with the Lord of the Dead and learned how to be a living statue. Her parents want their little girl back, the one who dressed in bright colours and was full of life, but that's not who she is and they can't cope any more and so she's moving into the Home for Wayward Children. We learn about how all this works, as best as anyone knows, alongside Nancy, and it's fascinating if never entirely understood.

As she's starting to settle down, learning how to deal with her dynamo of a roommate, Sumi, who misses her nonsense world, that roommate is murdered. This becomes a mystery, especially when another resident is also killed, and that shakes everyone and everything up. The mystery is hardly the best aspect of the book, the killer not particularly hard to figure out, but the worldbuilding is constant, even when we feel like we ought to be focusing on whodunit. It's hands down some of the greatest worldbuilding I've ever read and it's amazing how much Seanan got into a novella, never seeming to be crammed in any way. It feels utterly real, as if it just flowed out of her.

While the acceptance of difference is crucial to the survival of this sanctuary and it's so expansive that it welcomes us too, there's also strong use of diversity in ways that only fantasy can manage. For instance, the way a group forms to take care of the second body is impeccable. The characters aren't a clique, though they're acquainted, but they work well with each other, bringing their own particular skill to the table that was pivotal to who they were in their other, darker worlds, even if it was as a mad scientist. If I can truly accept myself for being different, I have to accept others for being different too, even if their differences are alien to me.

As you might expect, these characters are often obviously different anyway, because metaphor is powerful, but not always in typical ways. Kade is trans, a boy born in a girl's body, something that got him deported from his own world. Nancy is asexual but not aromantic; she appreciates beauty and closeness, but never feels sexual attraction to anyone. She also has what appears to be oddly dyed hair, the result of the Lord of the Dead running his fingers through the black and all the hair not touched turning white in jealousy. Jack is a tomboy, wearing pants and vests and bow ties, and a clinical outlook that's offputting to peers. I'm not any of those things but I felt those differences acutely, as I did their unique worlds, from the perspective of being an ex-pat.

The 'Wayward Children' is up to eight novellas at present and this astounding first entry is going to be hard not to follow up immediately with the next seven. I'll try to be patient. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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