bloodygranuaile | Fair value and feathers

Despite some issues with book formats I ended up very quickly ripping my way through Seanan McGuire’s In An Absent Dream, the fourth book in her very excellent Wayward Children series.

This one is about Katherine Lundy, known mostly as Lundy, who shows up in the first one afflicted with an odd sort of very slow Benjamin Button situation. Lundy’s world is the Goblin Market, a world that is extremely orderly in its own highly chaotic way, as is often this case with stories that touch on traditional fairy lore and all of its rules. In the Goblin Market the ruling principle of existence is giving “fair value” for things, and debts are held in the body, magical marks of wrongdoing applied and removed by the all-knowing magical Market itself.

Lundy is a loner, partly by nature and partly because her father is the elementary school principal and is also kind of an asshole, so nobody wants to hang out with her. She decides that this is OK and becomes a stern and quiet sort of Book Girl, the sort of overtly obedient one who looks for loopholes and ways to do her own thing very quietly and learns quickly that the more you follow the rules the more you’re actually allowed to get away with stuff as long as you don’t draw attention to it. I actually found her very relatable even though I was never quite that disciplined or obedient or friendless (though I was very much a Book Girl). Lundy assumes that she will grow up to be a librarian because she is a small child living in the suburbs in the ‘60s and that is the only book-related job she knows about. Lundy assumes she will grow up to have a husband because it would be very not-normal to not do so and Lundy assumes she is very normal (which she isn’t), but this does not at any point seem to be a thing she actually wants, is interested in, or has any plans to actively pursue in any way; it is assumed the universe will just dump one on her when it is time to be a normal grown-up. This assumption goes away when Lundy starts to intend to spend her adulthood in the Goblin Market instead. The book ends around when Lundy turns eighteen, and at no point in it does she express the faintest bit of interest in sex or romance, neither toward at any other character nor toward the idea of seeking it out. I like it a lot better than the kind of ace rep we got in the first book, to be honest--no whinging about how dating as an asexual is hard, no I’m-staring-at-this-beautiful-person-but-not-like-that, no vocabulary lessons. Just a complete lack of interest in or attention to the subject at any point. It’s quite nice.

A decent chunk of this book is about the power of friendship, since Lundy does in fact end up making one friend and makes some very risky bargains on her behalf. And another chunk of it is about family, which is also interesting because I feel like a lot of fairy tales either there’s no family or the family is so obviously terrible that there’s no reason for the child to be attached to them at all. But Lundy’s family is a bit more complex, with both her parents alive and well and truly thinking they’re doing their best by her even though they are emotionally stunted Silent Generation weirdos, and a little sister, Diana, who is too little to be important when Lundy first goes to the Market but who becomes an increasing tie back to the “real” world as she gets older and develops a personality. But most of the book is really about rules, and how they both make and obscure meaning, and about bargains and notions of fairness, and owing, and reciprocation. These might be slightly odd things for a YA series that has mostly been about identity and belonging and love and stuff like that to be about, but I think it ties in perfectly fine and is pretty important because, even though it is couched in the language of markets and money, it is about how you relate to the expectations people put on you, and we all spend a lot of time dealing with other people’s expectations, whether they’re spelled out explicitly or unspoken. “What kinds of authority do you consider legitimate and why” is at least as important a subject for YA literature as romance, in my opinion. (Insert recommendation for Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series here, if somehow you are reading my reviews but haven’t read it.) “What expectations of reciprocity are real and what are attempts at manipulation” is also a subject that could use more page space for young folks, I think.

Anyway, if you were ever a weird cerebral child with a strong sense of fairness and a lot of books who spent far too much time alone and thinking about economics, you might enjoy this one very much! Also, I’m excited there are apparently enough of us to be a target market.