By now I’d thought I had the hang of McGuire’s Wayward Children series: child escapes untenable home situation via magic door, steps into an environment uniquely suited to test their mettle and build vital aspects of their character, and returns (or not) as their situation warrants. In this one, heroine Antsy escapes a truly scary scenario that could well have led to abuse (sketched with terrible, aching realism by McGuire), but finds herself in a different type of world: an in-between place of endless variety, which she only slowly begins to realize comes at a very dear cost.
Tag: author-seanan mcguire
Someone in Time: Tales of Time Crossed Romance, ed. Jonathan Strahan
Short story collection, all about time traveling and falling in love. Some authors took the assignment literally (Theodora Goss’s A Letter to Merlin, in which time-traveling agents, sent to influence the behavior of historical figures, try to communicate with one another); others take a more roundabout route (Zen Cho’s The Past Life Reconstruction Service, in which people get to relive their past lives in search of answers for their present lives). Other standouts were Sam J. Miller’s Unabashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse, a poignant and unforgettable wail of pain; and Time Gypsy by Ellen Klages, which creates one of those beautiful perfect cause-and-effect time-travel loops while also pulling in themes of feminism, gay rights, and found family. Really great collection overall.
Seasonal Fears, by Seanan McGuire
Sequel to Middlegame, in that some of the same characters reoccur. This one deals with the embodiment of the seasons, in this case a pair of high school sweethearts too trope-y to be believed: a golden boy football star and his girlfriend the cheerleader. This is Seanan McGuire, though, so the characters are there both as symbols and as people: the football star is an embodiment of Summer, and his girlfriend becomes Winter; they find themselves catapulted into an all-or-nothing struggle to wear the seasonal crowns. McGuire does her best to keep the characters interesting, and her writing is gorgeous as usual… but really this is just a story about people who thought their lives were going to be normal, and who find out that they are actually myths: after a while, it’s hard to see them as entirely human, and therefore hard to care deeply about their journeys.
Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire
Seventh(?) in the Wayward Children series, this one is less about any one particular child’s journey than about the doorway universe as a whole, which weakens the (usually stellar) character work even as it lays the groundwork for further stories. The insertion of a couple of the characters into the “evil” school counterpart is a bit contrived, but you could tell McGuire wanted to explore the concept of the other school and what made it tick; I’m sure we’ll come back and explore it in following books.