I like the worlds and characters of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series a whole lot, and I like McGuire’s writing style: I mean, at one point in this book she describes how a skeleton “floated like a bath toy for the world’s most morbid child” (78). That said, this book was my least favorite of the series so far, I think because it’s a quest narrative, which made it feel both unputdownable and a bit less interesting to me. I mean, the mechanics of a quest narrative are pretty standard: a character or group sets out in search of something\/trying to accomplish some goal, there are twists and setbacks along the way, there is a climax in which they fail (or probably more usually) succeed, and then things get wrapped up at the end. The nature of a quest narrative means that it’s pretty plot-driven, which is part of what made me read this book so quickly, but plot-driven isn’t my favorite kind of fiction. Still, this book was a fun read. <\/p>\n
So, the plot: early in the book, a girl falls from the sky into the pond at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children (which is a school for kids who have traveled to other worlds and then ended up back in this one). The girl, Rini, is looking for her mother, who was a student there. But there’s a problem: her mother is dead. The fact of her mother’s death is making Rini herself disappear, and is also causing major problems in Rini’s home world, which her mother saved from an authoritarian ruler. So several students (Christopher and Kade, both of whom are great\/both of whom we know from previous books in the series, and Nadya, who spends a lot of time at the turtle pond wishing she were back in the river-world she went to, and Cora, a new student who was a mermaid in an ocean-world) set out with Rini to try to set things right. This involves a trip to a cemetery and the Halls of the Dead (where they hope an ex-student of the school will be able to help them out) and then to Rini’s home world, Confection, where farmers grow candy corn and the ocean is made of strawberry-rhubarb soda. The details of the settings are pleasing, and the advances and setbacks are exciting, and I like Cora, who proves herself smart, perceptive, and capable, even as she finds herself on a quest she never really signed up for, helping people she doesn’t really know. I also like the narrative’s body-positivity, even if it can feel a little heavy-handed, and the way it emphasizes strength through difference\/diversity: “Everyone’s lives prepared them for something different,” Cora thinks, at one point (76). And of course, in this kind of narrative, that means everyone has a part to play in the quest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I like the worlds and characters of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series a whole lot, and I like McGuire’s writing style: I mean, at one point in this book she describes how a skeleton “floated like a bath toy for the world’s most morbid child” (78). That said, this book was my least favorite of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}