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bloodygranuaileIn another short book for a short month (although this February is at least a little longer than most Februaries), I checked out the newest Wayward Children novella, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known. This one follows pretty directly upon the last one: our main character is again Antsy, who has found her way to the school and has sort-of fallen in with our group of series mains, rooming briefly with Cora and getting saved from Seraphina’s machinations by Kade, Sumi, Cora, Christopher, and some of the Whitethorn escapees.
This honestly seemed a little bit of a bridge book, referring heavily to stuff that happened elsewhere in the series and serving mostly to tidy up some loose ends around Antsy and, to a lesser extent, Sumi and Kora. The main plot is the direct follow-up to how Antsy left things at the shop, which perhaps not surprisingly didn’t go exactly to plan. There is some fun jaunting around to Prism and then to a world full of dinosaurs (I did honestly think the dinosaurs would take up more of the book, given that they are on the front cover, but the sojourn into dinosaur world was pretty brief), but most of it take place either at school or in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Series-wise, the biggest turn seems to be the increasing clues that Eleanor may be losing her touch and responsibility needing to be increasingly turned over to Kade–who, we find out, may have been kicked out of his world by the fairies whose rules he broke by being a guy, but who is wanted back in that world very much by the goblin side of things, who have named him the Goblin Prince. It would be great fun for the series to head in the direction of that showdown, but if it does, who will take care of the school? And that’s the thing that makes me want to read more of these–less the enjoyment of this particular installment and more just the positioning of the characters at the end, where some plotlines have resolved and others seem to be opening up. That said, these books are so short that it doesn’t feel like a big ripoff to have one installment where it feels like not much happened and stuff just moved around the way it would if this were a series of 800-page doorstoppers; sometimes you gotta move some characters around. Anyway, we’ll see what happens next.
This honestly seemed a little bit of a bridge book, referring heavily to stuff that happened elsewhere in the series and serving mostly to tidy up some loose ends around Antsy and, to a lesser extent, Sumi and Kora. The main plot is the direct follow-up to how Antsy left things at the shop, which perhaps not surprisingly didn’t go exactly to plan. There is some fun jaunting around to Prism and then to a world full of dinosaurs (I did honestly think the dinosaurs would take up more of the book, given that they are on the front cover, but the sojourn into dinosaur world was pretty brief), but most of it take place either at school or in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Series-wise, the biggest turn seems to be the increasing clues that Eleanor may be losing her touch and responsibility needing to be increasingly turned over to Kade–who, we find out, may have been kicked out of his world by the fairies whose rules he broke by being a guy, but who is wanted back in that world very much by the goblin side of things, who have named him the Goblin Prince. It would be great fun for the series to head in the direction of that showdown, but if it does, who will take care of the school? And that’s the thing that makes me want to read more of these–less the enjoyment of this particular installment and more just the positioning of the characters at the end, where some plotlines have resolved and others seem to be opening up. That said, these books are so short that it doesn’t feel like a big ripoff to have one installment where it feels like not much happened and stuff just moved around the way it would if this were a series of 800-page doorstoppers; sometimes you gotta move some characters around. Anyway, we’ll see what happens next.