Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire

I mostly liked this entry in the series. It's not my demographic or normal reading fare, but the stories are well told and keep me turning pages. This installment keeps most of the formula, but we're revisiting a character (Cora the mermaid of size) and getting to see that other school, the one for children who do not have good experiences with their Door.

I enjoyed seeing things through Cora's eyes. This series is useful for me to understand the world from a young woman's perspective. Except that the author is no longer young (not old either), so it definitely now feels like a reflection on childhood by a very connected, sympathetic adult.

Sadly, we don't get to see the real Whitethorn Institute. The ending does not live up to the setup and I'm left a bit sad that we haven't gotten a better portrayal of those who do not want their doors to reclaim them.

I'm sure this series will continue to get award nominations, so I'll likely keep reading it and not be disappointed in doing so. But I'm looking forward to a time when Seanan McGuire decides to take some time writing a book that grapples with an adult plot. AI is going to catch up to formula writing.

My Goodreads Review

Tangles, by Seanan McGuire

Like a lot of others, I think Tangles is OK for what it is, which is a story especially written for Magic: The Gathering lore. McGuire is a competent writer and can bring the story off. I'm kind of assuming that the explaining about the roles of the characters is to make them fit in the MtG world. So I'm not sure how it got on the Hugo list, though it's a great thing for MtG fans.

My Goodreads Review

Across the Green Grass Fields, by Seanan McGuire

This series has a really good formula and Seanan McGuire puts out solid work. She understands and is writing for girls just crossing that line from girl to woman. This time bringing some diverse understanding in by making the main character intersex. Folks like this are near and dear to me so I have stuck with this series as a way of understanding them.

The setup and characterization are fine here, if slightly threadbare at this point. It's a concept that's been worked pretty hard now, and I find myself paying attention to the fact that "our world", the one these children come from and go back to, is central, and all others are relatively simple expressions of one kind of fantasy space or another. In this one it's fantasy equines. Why privilege our world, without doing that explicitly?

Have to say this one disappoints due to the ending. It's just kind of lame. Ending books is hard, and it just seems like McGuire was on deadline to get this out and start on the next one. 2.5 rounded up for a sensitive story.

My Goodreads Review

Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire

This installment of the Wayward Children series is back in the Moors, but mostly about the characters going there and secondly about the general setting--the major characters (the Master and Dr. Bleak) are pretty much missing. But there's lots of action around Jack and Jill switching bodies, and Jack trying to set that right. Definitely an engaging read.

But like some others, I'm missing the aspects of searching for a Door that some of the other books have. These characters are longing for their doors, but it's an all-star show and they've all been through and been heroes in those worlds, saving them.

The setting is both endlessly generative (alternate worlds that seem to have some relationship, and structure for how they are classified) and maybe a bit limiting. The worlds may seem very structured or highly arbitrary, but they are all simplified versions of the reality we live in, which is not expressly privileged in the books but sort of comes out that way by reflection in the alternates. So we could call where we are Reality in this series.

The well-spoken bickering is really pronounced in this one. There's a lot of one-uppy "you don't understand because you don't know arbitrary rule x from my special universe". There are often larger points at play, but platitudes seem pretty close to hand in these instances. I don't know, it's just perhaps a little tiring. Maybe time to bring this series to its exciting conclusion?

My Goodreads Review

Juice Like Wounds, by Seanan McGuire

I read Juice Like Wounds as a setup for Come Tumbling Down. It's set in the Goblin Market universe, as a side quest with Moon, Lundy and Mockery. It's more lyrical and "writer-y" than the novellas. It's pretty much all explication--McGuire gives us a spoiler up front (one of the characters dies), and goes forward from there to explain the girls' characters and relationships from her omniscient perch. The action of the story is over before you know it, so I didn't get as wounded as some folks that read it. Probably optional to read in the series, but it's so quick that there's no reason not to read it. Available for free at TOR.com. 

My Goodreads Review

Phantoms of the Midway, by Seanan McGuire

 This story is a retelling of Hades and Persephone for The Mythic Dream collection.  Our protagonist lives in a carnival, and never gets to leave--her mother does it to protect her.  Turns out she is being protected from the knowledge that she is dead--hit by a truck as a little girl.  Her mother has trapped her ghost, which has grown up as a normal and substantial girl to everyone in the carnival--they can't even tell she is dead.  But as all young people do, she has to leave.  And find kindred spirits.

It's a good story, enjoyable and sad, but nothing deeper than that for me.

Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seanan McGuire is a very prolific author, and sometimes that shows in her books--all well written, some come off formulaic. The beginning of Middlegame seems like it's going to go that way. Then it takes an incredible left turn and you get a set of characters that have more depth and complexity than it seems like real humans can have, even. I spread my reading out over several nights, and this book kept me up past bedtime several times.

The trope of soul mates finding each other through remote presence is worked really well here. Roger and Dodger are the embodiment of Math and Language, and they complete each other. The book weaves the plot and their growth together seamlessly, one couldn't happen without the other. And then halfway through the book we get Erin, another embodiment with equal depth. Really amazing work.

The plot underneath is sort of ordinary, and that's fine. Alchemy is real (and sort of like magic), and several famous figures (Twain, Baum, etc.) have been working on it. The (self-proclaimed, and there's a lot of this) best alchemist in history was a woman ahead of her time, and wrote a fantasy primer on it disguised as children's literature. Her constructed protege (just like Frankenstein's monster, so I guess he was an alchemist too), James Reed, aims to complete her work. And this is why I can't give it a full 5 stars--the villains (Reed and his construct assistant Leigh Barrow) are both cardboard characters--over the top embodiments of evil. Comic book speech bubbles couldn't save them. So they are foils for the real stars. Also the ending involves what I think of as literary cheating, but endings are hard, particularly so for such a sweeping work.

Hands down the best thing I have read from McGuire, and it shows what she can really do. I hope she'll go for this level of quality over quantity all the time.


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In An Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Seanan McGuire is a prolific author, and sometimes that shows with the Wayward Children books. They are very well done but just a tad structured and formulaic, this one more than the others perhaps. Could be because the theme of the Goblin Market is all about rules for living together in a very structured way, but then again this series has a lot of that theme. The protagonist, Lundy, is for me not really a sympathetic character--she has formed her defenses well and found a way to live in our world, but this new one opens new possibilities for her. The themes are the usual ones from YA--friendship and growth--but it starts to get interesting just at the end, where the source of the Market's structure becomes more clear. But then we get the sad ending. I'm thinking Lundy will appear in future installations of this series, either devoted to her or as a strong side character. There's room for more development of the Goblin Market.



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Beneath a Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I can just barely give this book three stars. It's sort of fun to read, but it's definitely the kind of YA novel that made me avoid YA novels like the plague when I was actually a YA. It's a very formulaic quest book, with the point of the quest being a stop on the way to something else. We are also hit over the head repeatedly with the moral messages (the true pitfall of YA novels--the belief that they have to be so direct. Youth are not as obtuse as adults when it comes to getting a moral point that applies to themselves. They get a lot of practice at it).

Seanan McGuire is very talented at executing a story. I have seen this kind of devolution before (in the Feed series) where the plots just kind of run out of steam. The trick is to stop writing before you run out of things to say. Or come up with more things. It's gotten several award nominations, but that may say more about the state of the written word in F&SF than its quality.



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Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Seanan McGuire is a seriously prolific author, and I kind of thought with the first book in this series (Every Heart a Doorway) that that showed a bit. The Wayward Children universe is a rather structured set of alternate universes, in the way that YA fiction often works. But in this prequel covering the story of Jack and Jill, McGuire spends only a little time toward the end explicating the doors to these places and their themes. Most of it digs into the character of the Moors (the place), and how the characters of the girls fit the place (or have their corners rounded off or sharpened to fit). The Moors itself is an archetype, but the girls get fully fleshed out, and a lot of their behavior in the previous book becomes easier to understand (Ms. Wilson hints at it). I think the series is growing, and I'll be reasonably happy reading the next one.



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Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

Every Heart a Doorway is the first book in the Wayward Children series, and the last of the novellas nominated for a Nebula that I'll be reading this year. 

McGuire is a very competent and prolific author.  I am familiar with her through her Newsflesh trilogy (here is one of my reviews) which was aimed more at adults, but a lot of her work is aimed at teen girls.  Every Heart a Doorway is one of those.

The story is fairly basic.  Our protagonist is one of a number of girls thought to be kidnapped, but actually having visited an alternate reality through one of many fairy-tale type doorways that open up to those who look for them.  There are a few boys, but mostly it is a girl thing.  The girls sometimes return from these alternate realities, willingly or unwillingly, and are thus reunited with their families, but are permanently changed by their experiences.  They don't fit here anymore, and the ones sent to Eleanor Wilson's Home for Wayward Children want to go back to their alternate worlds.  The actual plot in this book is a murder mystery--the girls are getting killed one by one--but mostly it illustrates the alternate worlds.  It's all pretty orderly--there are major and minor axes for the types of worlds.  There are a few plot inconsistencies that cause grief in this orderly universe--the worlds the girls discover "fit them well" and they want to go back, but there's also a mention of another home for those who hated their alternate world experience and don't want to go back.  Oops.

So this is another fairly well executed, not overly original book by McGuire.  If you like the rest of her stuff you will like this.  3 stars.

McGuire, Seanan - In Sea-Salt Tears

I am a pretty obsessive-compulsive reader, perhaps in other things as well but particularly reading. I read things in sets, taking what comes.  Sometimes these sets don't hang together so well, or lead me directions I don't want to go, and I agonize over changing them.  That's the obsessive part. 

And so it went with In Sea-Salt Tears.  I normally like to read stories in a series in the order they were written, and will make a point to try and catch up a series if a later novel is nominated for one of the awards I follow.  I did this for the Vorkosigan Saga, and also for Game of Thrones. 

So I found that In Sea-Salt Tears was nominated for a Hugo, and went looking for a legal free version.  The story is self-published by McGuire, in this case meaning that she is giving it away.  A good practice for award nominees, I think. I don't usually catch up a series in order to read a short story--I didn't do this for Lawrence Schoen's Buffalito series, the latest of which was nominated for a Nebula this year and thus I read it.  But McGuire clearly states that her entry will make more sense if you have read the novels that come before it--the October Daye series, five of them.  My local library has them, but they look pretty much like YA novels aimed at 14 year old girls.  And the series started out a bit spotty, according to reviewers.  So in the end, I decided to just read her nominated story, and see if I feel like catching the series up.

I liked the story.  It stands alone reasonably well as a tale and is deserving of the nomination, though I don't think it will win.  Her tone is very different from when she is writing as Mira Grant, which shows her range.  As a romance and a scene-setter it does just fine, though like her zombie novels it is in a crowded space.  But I don't think I'll go read the rest of the series just for this story.  If one of the October Daye novels gets nominated for a Big Three award later, I'll read them all.  3 stars from me.