Wayward Children Series Review
Hello again friends! Sorry it’s been a bit since the last post. We took a short but amazing vacation to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado last week and it was amazing. So much fun to see and do at really high elevations. But this week I hope to have two posts out, both book reviews of what I’ve been reading lately. And maybe a quarterly progress post after that, as we reach the midway part of the year. Today is just a great afternoon for writing: it’s 105 degrees outside and too hot to do anything but sit with a book or a computer. So, let’s see how far this can take me today.
For starters, I’ve spent a good portion of the last month reading Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. As far as I know, there are 6 books in the series so far. That’s what I read anyway. Goodreads shows another installment coming out in January 2022, which will be fun to look forward to. If your brain got stuck on “read 6 books in the series in the last month” (which is not what I actually said, but is what I did), don’t be too worried about my life. These books are short and sweet, coming in just about 200 pages each. So all together, about the same as ONE of the Robin Hobb books I read earlier this year. I’m pretty sure they are all actually categorized as Novellas, they’re so short. But that doesn’t mean bad, simple, or boring. These books are fantastic, and I’ll tell you all about it. But first, I should mention that I got the first 5 ebooks free from the Tor.com book club (which is awesome, they give away a book every month and last year during pandemic times they did extras like Murderbot and Wayward Children). After getting the free ebooks, I was just going to read on my kindle. But then… a giveaway by tordotcom publishing on Instagram came up for the first three books, and even though there were only a few winners I was one of them!! The books came in on my birthday which was extra special. And a friend sent me her extra copy of book 6, so I only read 2 of them on my kindle after all. (I love my kindle, but really prefer to have hard copies in my hand; call me old fashioned I guess.)
On to the review. There will likely be spoilers for the first book, as it’s hard to talk about the later ones without spoiling anything from that. I will try to avoid spoiling later books as much as possible though. The concept for Wayward Children is portal worlds and kids who don’t fit in. Basically, if a kid is neglected, doesn’t fit in, has significant differences from the norm, etc. they can find a Door that will take them to their own perfect fantasy world. Not that these are all rainbows and cupcakes (though some worlds are all about rainbows, and one is Confection (it’s basically Candy Land). These kids become heroes, saving the world and it becomes their true home like Home never quite was before. Unfortunately, a lot of these kids come back through their Doors into the regular world years later when they aren’t quite adults but also are not the kids they were when they left. One person who had this happen established a school for others of these children, where they can come together and learn to live in this world while hoping for the Door back to their own world to come for them again. The worlds are crazy different from here and from each other: Underworlds, Goblin Markets, Mermaid trenches, Moors that are definitely more Horror movie than anything else, Confection, Hooflands, Skeleton kingdoms, Fairylands, Spider kingdom… it’s an endless spectrum of possibilities. Which makes a great and varied series with nearly endless potential. Also a note, most of the main characters (though not all) fall into LGBTQIA+ categories, which is great reading for Pride Month. I (as someone who is hetero and has not much experience with alternate sexualities) learned a lot about what it means to be different in these ways.
Book 1, Every Heart a Doorway, is from Nancy’s perspective. She came from an Underworld where stillness (never moving, barely eating, etc) was highly prized. The regular world is bright and fast to her. She comes to the school and rooms with Sumi, who was completely the opposite: bright, loud, fast, and full of nonsense. She also meets Kade, Jack and Jill (twin sisters), Christopher, and a few others including Lundy, a teacher who is aging backwards Benjamin Button style. After just a couple days, Sumi is murdered by having her hands cut off in the night. Then Lundy is killed by having her brain removed, and another student is killed for her beautiful face. It’s pretty gruesome and very murder mystery. Eventually, they catch Jill (see, spoilers) who was trying to build a perfect person to get back through her Door. Jack kills her and opens her Door, taking the dead sister with her to resurrect (the Moors are definitely Horror movie: Jack was apprenticed to a mad scientist, while Jill was the adopted daughter of the Vampire master). At the end, they clean it all up and Nancy’s door opens again (which is happily ever after for these kids).
Book 2, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, is the backstory of Jack (Jaqueline) and Jill (Jillian) and how they found their way to the Moors and how they left. Vampire master, Mad Scientist master, and terrified villagers in between make up a lot of their world. Pretty straightforward story, and good if morbid (since that’s the world…).
Book 3 Beneath the Sugar Sky, is back to the school. A person falls from the sky into the pond, to kick off a quest. Quests are generally forbidden to students (they get addicting apparently. These kids like saving the world.). But Rimi begs for help as she’s disappearing because her mother Sumi (dead girl, book 1) never came back through the door. So she’s from an alternate future and wants to save her mom. A bunch of students including Kade, Christopher, and Cora (who was a mermaid) go on the quest to put Sumi back together. Christopher uses his bone flute to animate her skeleton out of the grave (nice clean bones, thankfully). Then they go to Nancy’s Underworld for her spirit, and on to Confection to find her magical self. The Baker of Confection ends up baking a body to put her back together and poof! She’s alive again, the future is safe. Kinda weird, yes. Fun though.
Book 4 In an Absent Dream, is the story of Lundy. How she found her Door and went through multiple times throughout childhood and teen years. She was about to choose her world forever when her younger sister convinced her to wait. And then it was almost too late, Lundy was unsure and asked for a potion to slow her age while she took time to choose. And it backfired, of course. She was thrown out of the Market and began aging backward, a week for each year or something. As a teacher in book 1 she appeared to be 8 years old, but she was really closer to 60 years.
Book 5 Come Tumbling Down, is all about what happened when Jack and Jill went back to the Moors. And this is full on Horror, with more Questing added in. Kade and Cora nearly don’t make it back, Jill is gone for good, and Jack is where she belongs forever.
Book 6, Across the Green Grass Fields, is a complete jump away from all of our familiar characters. Reagan runs away from school when her ‘best friend’ turns on her and finds her way to the Hooflands, where centaurs, unicorns, satyrs, and everyone else really, are hoofed animals. They have distinctly different cultures and are ruled by a Queen in a castle who has gone bad. Reagan’s job is to save the world, but she isn’t ready and hides out in the forest with the centaurs to grow up. When it’s time to face her Destiny, she goes straight to it. And uncovers a dirty truth about the government and the Queen. She tells the people of the court what’s happened and refuses to fix it all, and her Door then dumps her back home.
Throughout the stories are great themes of belonging, home, and family. Also the need for rules, and how different rules work for different people. The worlds are vibrant and real, the characters feel like people you’d want to know in real life. McGuire does a fantastic job with the writing in general, though occasionally we get different POV characters on the same page; it’s an omniscient narrator thing and I get it but it still bugs me sometimes. In general the books are fantastic. My favorites are 1, 2, and 4, though I don’t dislike any of them. I didn’t connect with book 6 as much as the others, but the message, writing, worldbuilding and such were all on point. This series has won multiple awards and I found it very much deserved. In general, I’d recommend these at a 14yo age/level. Mostly because the horror elements in some of the books are super creepy, but also because some of the content is just a little more mature than my 12yo kids have been ready for. I’m excited to see what comes next in the series, I really want to hear about Kade’s time through his Door and a few of the other characters as well.
