Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else.
But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. (from Goodreads)
Books:
Every Heart a Doorway | Down Among the Sticks & Stones | Beneath the Sugar Sky | In an Absent Dream
Come Tumbling Down | Across the Green Grass Fields | Where the Drowned Girls Go
Lost in the Moment and Found | Mislaid in Parts Half-Known | Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear
author: Seanan McGuire | released: 2016 – 2025 | publisher: Tordotcom
cover love: ♥♥♥♥♥
Review:
In Every Heart a Doorway, Lundy tells Nancy, “People do so love a good fantasy”.
I can absolutely agree.
Seanan McGuire has not just written a wonderful fantasy series, she has a written a work of art. McGuire’s writing style is one of comfort for me. There were so many times while reading this series that I found myself abandoning the quiet narrative in my head and choosing to read the beautiful passages out loud. They are fairytales. Modern, portal fairytales. McGuire digs deep within our childhood memories and reminds us of everything we remember about girls falling down rabbit holes, siblings finding lamp posts in the back of wardrobes and boys we follow off to Neverland.
The Wayward Children series has a bit of your favorite childhood fantasies weaved into every door. Upon reading the first book, the tone is so warm and inviting, like a knit blanket and a crackling fire. And when you’re done, you just want to move on to the next one and the next one (and sometimes back to the beginning to re-read some details because you learned something new).
What makes McGuire’s series so unique is her motley crew of characters at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Eleanor’s school is for children (older and younger) who have visited another world through a magical door and are thrown back into the real world for either a short time or forever. Some find their way back through their door to whatever world they were happy in. Some never find a door again.
The series begins when a new student, Nancy, comes to live at Eleanor’s. From there, we are introduced to the rest of the characters: Kade, Sumi, Jack & Jill, Christopher and other main characters in later installments: Rini, Cora, Lundy (her younger/older self) and Regan. They are diverse on many levels, such as skin tone, body types, gender-fluidity and culture. Some of them are asexual, intersexual, trans, etc. Some of them went to Nonsense worlds, some of them went to High Wicked worlds. Some went to the Trenches. Others went to Fairylands or Underworlds. Instead of North, South, East and West, their map directions are Nonsense, Logic, Virtue and Wicked (you can see a map here). The creativity in this series will have your head spinning. It’s like anything goes…but sometimes it can’t. It just depends on which door you walk through.
The books in the series fit into two groups. Group 1 (books 1, 3, 5, 7) feature most of the characters from the series debut. They usually begin at Eleanor’s home in the present day and the children go on adventures through other doors to other worlds together. They go to help other characters like Jack down in the Moors or up, up high into the sky to Sumi’s world called Confection. Group 2 (books 2,4,6) introduce new characters finding their doors for the first time and navigating the new world they’ve found (with the exception of book 4; being about Lundy’s past and why she ages backwards). The books in the former group, I enjoyed more. I liked the full spectrum of character’s rather than the other group, which just followed one character’s story at a time. Books 1-4 I found quite enjoyable but the books start to really lack luster after Book 5. Book 6 and 7 weren’t nearly as good as I had hope for.
However, I still love this series and even though I haven’t enjoyed the last two books. I’m still intrigued and in wonderment of McGuire’s wayward children. There are 3 more books to come in the future and I’m really hoping that one of them is about Kade and his world, Prism and everything about him because he’s such a great character yet not much is said of his past. I would also like to know more about Eleanor as well.
The Books:
Every Heart a Doorway – Rating: 4 Stars
Nancy comes to Eleanor’s hoping to find a way back to her door, back to her Underworld with the The King of the Dead. There she meets and befriends the other eccentric students and soon is in the middle of a murder mystery. People are dying and parts of them are stolen. Nancy and the others have to find out who is behind the murders before one of the them is next. This was probably the best book in the series and the favorite. It had an array of diversity within each character. The writing was impeccable, dreamy and really made you feel like you were reading an old fairytale. After reading the whole series, I’ve come to appreciate this first installment even more. You almost want to go back and start all over. Sumi was her best self, she was super inappropriate and I was laughing out loud at the things she said. Kade was dreamy and oh-so the flirt. Nancy was Nancy, I’ll put it that way. Jack and Jill, the twins but different as can be. Christopher, the boy in love with the Skeleton girl back in Mariposa. I don’t think I’ll forget any of them.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones – Rating: 3 Stars
We go back in time and learn about Jack and Jill. The identical twins. We learn how they found an old trunk in a closet that had stairs, not clothes, that descended down, down, down into the darkness. The twins followed the stairs down into the Moors: a world forever in Twilight with a red moon, stormy oceans and craggy mountains. In the Moors is where Jack is taken to live with Dr. Bleak and Jill is taken to live with her Master. And the twins soon realize how different they really are. I feel like the writing was still as spectacular in this book as it was the previous one. However, the pacing was off. The first part of the book (the back story) really dragged. So much, that I had to take off a star. The back story about how their parents came to have children and how they acted when they had two twin girls instead of a boy and a girl, and gender roles, etc. was too drawn out and could’ve been clipped. On that almost same note, I felt like the end was too quick. Just when I got good and comfortable in the story; Jack living in a windmill, doing science experiments and dating a girl named Alexis and Jill living in a castle trying her hardest to be a vampire’s wife, the story was pretty much over. I felt like the story itself was good but the pacing of events left it to feel unbalanced.
Beneath the Sugar Sky – 4 Stars
Back at Eleanor’s, we meet a new student, Cora: a mermaid from the Trenches, now back in the real world without her fins. She meets Rini, Sumi’s daughter (don’t ask), who’s just fallen out of the sky and into a turtle pond. Her world, Confection is in danger and she needs her mother’s help. Unfortunately, Sumi isn’t alive anymore and it’s going to take the whole Wayward gang to resurrect her and get her back to Confection so Rini can be born (again, don’t ask). This one was really good, it was the most fun to read out of all the books. Not only did we meet Nancy again, happy in the Halls of the Dead but we get to visit Sumi’s world of candy and cake, Confection. It’s like Willy Wonka meets Candyland. The passages describing Confection were some of my favorites with soda seas, fondant forests, candy corn fields, roads made of graham crackers, trees with sugar leaves and grass made of frosting. And there’s so much more. You could get a toothache from all the sugar in this book! My favorite scene is the end where they finally have have to put Sumi back together (with ingredients lol) and we meet the Baker (very interesting). McGuire really shows a more light and colorful side of the series in Book 3.
In an Absent Dream – 4 stars
Another favorite of mine in the series. This one is about Lundy and how she came to be a 9-year old therapist at Eleanor’s school. I loved Lundy and her story. She went to the Goblin Market, where everything is about fair trade, fair value. And it’s also a huge theme in the book, fairness. How does one decide what is fair value? Lundy is very smart and respects a world where rules mean everything and if broken, it’s quite natural to have consequences. She spends her days with Moon, an owlish girl, and they buy/sell/trade at the market. Everything must be “paid” for. A sock for water, a trinket for a meal, etc. If you take without giving you fall into debt and debt in the Goblin Market is no joke. She spends time with the Archivist, who becomes her mentor, teaching her all about the Goblin Market and how to save Moon from the fate of being in too much debt. Lundy also has the ability to travel home, back the way she came. She does this a couple of times in the 10 years since finding her door. With every trip, she’s shown the aftermath of what her disappearing has done to her family and she isn’t sure what to do. She has to decide by her 18th birthday to stay in one world or the other. Lundy, a lover of rules, tries to bend them in her favor…and pays a hefty price. I feel like this was the book with the heaviest theme. It was dark yet transparent. The weight of fair value took on many different shapes and meanings. The ending stuck with me, because I know there’s probably more to come about Lundy’s family. And the writing was excellent as ever. Theres’s also a short story, Juice Like Wounds, that tells of Lundy and her friends’ battle with the Wasp Queen.
Come Tumbling Down – 3 Stars
So we’re back with the Wayward gang and Jack and Jill from the Moors. Jack makes a door back to Eleanor’s school but she’s in Jill’s body! She asks her friends to come back to the Moors and help steal her real body back from her sister and her Master. Jill still desperately wants to become a vampire but she can’t because she’s died and been resurrected. She needs a fresh new body and her twin’s is perfect. Even though I should’ve loved this book, it did not hit like the previous ones. That bothers me because I really like Jack and Jill and their duality but I ran into the same issue I had with their adventures in Book 2: the pacing. Half of the book just dragged. Too much time was spent on them just getting to the Moors and by the time they get there, the book is over. Also, I felt like there was way too much emphasis on just how uncomfortable Jack was in her sister’s body (I get it, she has OCD, let’s move on). Now the last 25% did HIT, and that’s the only reason why I gave the book 3 stars. By the end, McGuire finally put the emotions, the connection, the meat into Book 5. I literally almost cried when Kade and Jack said goodbye.
Across the Green Grass Fields – 2 Stars
To be honest, as soon as I read the blurb, I kinda knew I wasn’t going to like this book. Book 6 introduces us to a new character, Regan. When Regan learns she is intersexual and confides in a friend who then betrays her trust, she runs away and finds a door in the woods. There, she finds herself in the Hooflands, a world with all types of fantastical creatures featuring hooves: Centaurs, Unicorns, Minotaurs, etc. She’s found by a centaur named Pansy in a large meadow and she’s brought back to live with Pansy’s family. She’s there for several years, all the while knowing that she is destined to go see The Queen. Because humans only end up in the Hooflands for one reason: to save it. So I really didn’t care for Regan at all, I felt like she had little to no personality and I didn’t click with her story or feel any connection between her and the centaur family she lived with. McGuire’s writing started to suffer as well, it felt less magical than in her previous work. The book was slow and passive and I wasn’t interested at all in what happened to the characters.
Where the Drowned Girls Go – 2 Stars
So I was very excited for this book and to get back to Eleanor and the Wayward gang. I was also very interested to learn about the Whitethorn Institute, the other school that took in children that had found doors and went to other worlds. But unlike Eleanor’s school, where they helped the children cope with what they’d been through, still letting them hope for another door someday, the Whitethorn Institute wanted to help children forget they had ever gone to magical lands and convince them that it was all a delusion. Since the trip to the Moors, Cora had come back changed, she had been drawn to the sea and seen the Drowned Gods. Now they won’t leave her alone. They haunt her at night and she just wants to forget everything. She begs Eleanor for a transfer to Whitethorn, where she feels she’ll get the help she needs and be able to go on with her life. But of course, things aren’t what they seem at the Institute and now Cora has to find a way out. This latest book was not any better than Book 6. Again, the writing wasn’t as good as in the past and the storyline didn’t grab me and pull me in the way the earlier ones did. Kade makes a relatively small cameo and though Sumi has a slightly bigger appearance, her character is a bit watered down (again, compared to previous books she’s in). Besides them, none of the other Wayward characters from Eleanor’s were present. But, to my shock, Regan from Book 6 is one of the Whitethorn’s students. We do meet other characters, Cora’s roommates at the Institute but there’s nothing fascinating about them. There’s nothing that fascinating about the Institute either. The whole book was just Cora being unhappy here, then unhappy there, then wanting to escape. The story was very bland compared to where I know McGuire can take us and I just wasn’t impressed. I’m really hoping the next book is better.
Favorite Book: Tie: Every Heart a Doorway & In an Absent Dream
Least Favorite Book: Across the Green Grass Fields
Favorite Characters: Kade & Sumi 🙂
Favorite Cover: Beneath the Sugar Sky
Favorite World: Tie: Confection & The Halls of the Dead
4.5