Turtles all the way down
Mar. 6th, 2026 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileOK, so there’s one Wayward Children book written every year, basically, and published at the top of the year, and I am actually more than a full year behind. This is, somewhat paradoxically, the fault of a very kind local bookseller, who informed me that the Wayward Children series is actually an adult series and not YA, which promptly Ruined It until I checked Goodreads and it is indeed labeled YA. A good story is a good story but there’s a certain amount of “spelling things out explicitly” that is fine for stories aimed at younger audiences but makes me feel talked down to if I think the story is actually aimed at adults.
Anyway, having re-convinced myself that Wayward Children is YA as befits its ease of reading, ages of the protagonist, general coming-of-age themes, and tendency toward plainly stated moral insights, I checked out Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, the tenth installment. This one follows a Russian orphan named Nadezhda, who was born missing most of one arm, and who managed to have basically a perfectly fine time at the orphanage in which she was raised. At nine years old, she is adopted by an American family on some sort of Christian missionary trip and taken to Denver, where her new parents are–not cruel, really, they are in fact painstakingly nice, but in a very specific way where they’ve got a lot of unexamined assumptions about how things are supposed to work and do not seem to be very interested in Nadya’s specific and individual thoughts and feelings about anything except as they conform to their own preconceived notions of poor foreign orphans who ought to be grateful they’ve been rescued. They get her a prosthetic arm, which she hadn’t asked for and didn’t think she needed, and that ends up really being the inciting incident for Nadya falling into a turtle pond and becoming a Drowned Girl.
Like all the Wayward Children books, this book has Themes, and an impressive number of them for a book of less than 150 pages. The most obvious one is the disability justice one, where Nadya doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her until other people make it very clear that they think that she can’t possibly be happy with herself. Bodily autonomy, and children’s lack of autonomy in general, is also a big one, and very explicitly bound up in a critique of certain types of grown-ups for whom children are a prop in having a particular kind of correct life. The Christian evangelical flavor of Pansy and Carl’s approach to adoption cannot be overlooked, but it’s just a particularly intense version of a widespread enough failure to see children as individual people. The most jarring moment of the book for me was a brief dip into Pansy’s POV, where she thinks “She’d tried so hard to understand the girl,” and realizing the it was entirely believable that Pansy really thought that. She’d tried to guess and reason from the information she had according to the logic and assumptions she thought were reasonable about the Way Stuff Worked, but what she hadn’t done was ask, and it had never occurred to her that asking could be a way of obtaining information about somebody, and eventually even if she did ask, she was teaching Nadya not to bother answering honestly because she got so visibly upset and disappointed if the answer wasn’t the one she was expecting–i.e., she was never actually asking a question, she was looking for validation. And lots of people go through life relating to other people in that way and wondering why they’re so disappointed in everybody.
Anyway, Nadya eventually goes to live with the turtles in a magnificent underwater city full of Drowned (but very much alive) humans and talking turtles, and her prosthetic arm is eaten by a giant frog, and the river water provides her with a new arm only when she actually wants it, but even this arm is also an obligation, because the river’s gifts are never free. Unsurprisingly, this eventually results in her getting pulled back into our world–at her previous age, after growing up and getting married in Belyyreka, which must have been a pretty nasty shock–and that’s how she’s going to end up at Eleanor’s, even though we haven’t gotten quite that far yet. It’s been so long since I’ve read the earlier ones of these books that I can’t remember if we’ve met Nadya yet (we’ve met another Drowned Girl, but her story was different and didn’t have turtles). Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next one!
Anyway, having re-convinced myself that Wayward Children is YA as befits its ease of reading, ages of the protagonist, general coming-of-age themes, and tendency toward plainly stated moral insights, I checked out Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, the tenth installment. This one follows a Russian orphan named Nadezhda, who was born missing most of one arm, and who managed to have basically a perfectly fine time at the orphanage in which she was raised. At nine years old, she is adopted by an American family on some sort of Christian missionary trip and taken to Denver, where her new parents are–not cruel, really, they are in fact painstakingly nice, but in a very specific way where they’ve got a lot of unexamined assumptions about how things are supposed to work and do not seem to be very interested in Nadya’s specific and individual thoughts and feelings about anything except as they conform to their own preconceived notions of poor foreign orphans who ought to be grateful they’ve been rescued. They get her a prosthetic arm, which she hadn’t asked for and didn’t think she needed, and that ends up really being the inciting incident for Nadya falling into a turtle pond and becoming a Drowned Girl.
Like all the Wayward Children books, this book has Themes, and an impressive number of them for a book of less than 150 pages. The most obvious one is the disability justice one, where Nadya doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her until other people make it very clear that they think that she can’t possibly be happy with herself. Bodily autonomy, and children’s lack of autonomy in general, is also a big one, and very explicitly bound up in a critique of certain types of grown-ups for whom children are a prop in having a particular kind of correct life. The Christian evangelical flavor of Pansy and Carl’s approach to adoption cannot be overlooked, but it’s just a particularly intense version of a widespread enough failure to see children as individual people. The most jarring moment of the book for me was a brief dip into Pansy’s POV, where she thinks “She’d tried so hard to understand the girl,” and realizing the it was entirely believable that Pansy really thought that. She’d tried to guess and reason from the information she had according to the logic and assumptions she thought were reasonable about the Way Stuff Worked, but what she hadn’t done was ask, and it had never occurred to her that asking could be a way of obtaining information about somebody, and eventually even if she did ask, she was teaching Nadya not to bother answering honestly because she got so visibly upset and disappointed if the answer wasn’t the one she was expecting–i.e., she was never actually asking a question, she was looking for validation. And lots of people go through life relating to other people in that way and wondering why they’re so disappointed in everybody.
Anyway, Nadya eventually goes to live with the turtles in a magnificent underwater city full of Drowned (but very much alive) humans and talking turtles, and her prosthetic arm is eaten by a giant frog, and the river water provides her with a new arm only when she actually wants it, but even this arm is also an obligation, because the river’s gifts are never free. Unsurprisingly, this eventually results in her getting pulled back into our world–at her previous age, after growing up and getting married in Belyyreka, which must have been a pretty nasty shock–and that’s how she’s going to end up at Eleanor’s, even though we haven’t gotten quite that far yet. It’s been so long since I’ve read the earlier ones of these books that I can’t remember if we’ve met Nadya yet (we’ve met another Drowned Girl, but her story was different and didn’t have turtles). Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next one!