Not that kind of killer
Feb. 27th, 2022 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFor some reason I had thought that Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series was complete after Across the Green Grass Fields, but there was no reason for me to actually think that, and I was pleased to discover that I was wrong, with the publication of Where the Drowned Girls Go. This one is about Cora, the mermaid, who is suffering something somewhere between PTSD and being haunted after her encounter with the Drowned Gods in the Moors, a very different set of underwater shenanigans than her first time through a door, her “own” door to the Trenches.
Cora decides that she can’t get better at Miss Eleanor’s and decides to transfer to the other school for children who have experienced portal fantasies: the Whitethorn Institute, a grimly regimented reform-school type of establishment designed to crush the desire to re-find their doors out of the students.
The grueling conformity of Whitethorn, which is basically a kind of psychological boot camp, actually does wind up helping Cora beat back the influence of the Drowned Gods, but the cost is high. The students are largely miserable and take it out on each other. Cora sticks out due to her size and her blue hair, and the sleep problems she’s been having ever since the Drowned Gods got their tentacles into her psyche don’t mesh well with the brutally rigid schedule and early-morning alarms. She doesn’t make friends.
At least, not until Sumi shows up and, being Sumi, causes chaos.
Like the other Wayward Children books, this volume focuses on a lot of heavy subjects but ultimately winds up being a heartwarming adventure. Fatphobia, bullying, trauma, and attempted suicide are major subjects; the series themes of identity, conformity, choice, and rejection are continued. Eventually the characters learn to work together to get themselves out of their predicament (in this case, the Institute) and be big damn heroes along the way (in this case, by figuring out some terrible secrets about how the Institute is run and staffed) and some of them even become friends. Regan, from Across the Green Grass Fields, makes an appearance and is folded into our main gang of heroes.
According to Goodreads another book is expected next year, and it looks like there are actually supposed to be 10 books in the series. I’m pleased about this since I find this series to be really good comfort reads–they’re short and queer and genre-savvy and full of big feelings and the Power of Friendship and finding out who you really are, and they are a bit sentimental and full of absurd things and could easily be just flat-out cheesy but they’re just smart and dark enough not to be. I could reread the whole series in a weekend.
Cora decides that she can’t get better at Miss Eleanor’s and decides to transfer to the other school for children who have experienced portal fantasies: the Whitethorn Institute, a grimly regimented reform-school type of establishment designed to crush the desire to re-find their doors out of the students.
The grueling conformity of Whitethorn, which is basically a kind of psychological boot camp, actually does wind up helping Cora beat back the influence of the Drowned Gods, but the cost is high. The students are largely miserable and take it out on each other. Cora sticks out due to her size and her blue hair, and the sleep problems she’s been having ever since the Drowned Gods got their tentacles into her psyche don’t mesh well with the brutally rigid schedule and early-morning alarms. She doesn’t make friends.
At least, not until Sumi shows up and, being Sumi, causes chaos.
Like the other Wayward Children books, this volume focuses on a lot of heavy subjects but ultimately winds up being a heartwarming adventure. Fatphobia, bullying, trauma, and attempted suicide are major subjects; the series themes of identity, conformity, choice, and rejection are continued. Eventually the characters learn to work together to get themselves out of their predicament (in this case, the Institute) and be big damn heroes along the way (in this case, by figuring out some terrible secrets about how the Institute is run and staffed) and some of them even become friends. Regan, from Across the Green Grass Fields, makes an appearance and is folded into our main gang of heroes.
According to Goodreads another book is expected next year, and it looks like there are actually supposed to be 10 books in the series. I’m pleased about this since I find this series to be really good comfort reads–they’re short and queer and genre-savvy and full of big feelings and the Power of Friendship and finding out who you really are, and they are a bit sentimental and full of absurd things and could easily be just flat-out cheesy but they’re just smart and dark enough not to be. I could reread the whole series in a weekend.