One of the rules of Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children (a boarding school for children who have travelled to other worlds but have been forced back to the world they were born in, which is our world) is “No quests” (15). But rules sometimes get broken, and this is definitely a quest narrative. Jack (short for Jacqueline) Wolcott and her twin sister Jill were students at the school in the past, but made their way back to the world of the Moors, where Jill has been being spoiled by a vampire father-figure and Jack has been learning mad science as an apprentice to a man named Dr. Bleak. The Moors are a creepy place, but they have their own balance, which is now at risk thanks to Jill, who wants to be a vampire herself and has engaged in some body-snatching to make that possible. (There are reasons/it’s complicated.) Jack needs to stop Jill, and also needs to get her body back, and also wants to see what she can do about making sure that Dr. Bleak is alive to keep teaching her (and to keep the Moors from descending into chaos). (As one character puts it: “the windmill stands empty, with no scientist to hold back the dark and no apprentice to risk the storm. This isn’t how things are supposed to happen in the Moors. You can’t have a single unopposed force” (71).)
So Jack needs help, and her old school friends are happy to assist: Christopher (who went to a skeleton-filled world called Mariposa that is still less creepy than the Moors), Kade (Eleanor’s great-nephew), Cora (who was a mermaid in an underwater world) and Sumi (who went to a nonsense world full of candy) all go to the Moors to help Jack and her fiancée, Alexis, do what needs to be done.
This book (which is the fifth in the Wayward Children series) was perfect summer vacation reading: I started it one morning and finished it later the same day, and the pace and style were exactly what I was in the mood for. I really love Sumi in this book: she’s perceptive and energetic and pushes the action forward while dispensing wisdom to Jack. Like: “panic is fun, but sometimes revenge is better” (41). Or: “The world doesn’t stop spinning because you’re sad, and that’s good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is” (107). I also like the moments of humor, like when Jack says she’s heard that “the public house nearest the docks serves excellent chowder that practically never contains human flesh” (142). There are moments of sweetness, too, like this description of Jack and Alexis speaking in sign language to each other (Alexis can hear, but sometimes loses her voice): “Sometimes they’d abandon signs in the middle of a gesture, their message already conveyed, language become shorthand become intuitive understanding” (53).
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