When I started listening to audiobooks, I was a little intimidated by the length of some of the titles offered in the Scribd subscription I just signed up for at the time. This is why I specifically selected shorter books, which included the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire.
We’ve all read fictional stories about children who go through doorways that take them to a different world where they end up having adventures. But what we don’t think about is what happens to those children after the adventure and when the doors return them to our world. In the book series, these children end up at Eleanor’s West House for Wayward Children. To the parents, it’s a pretense of rehabilitation for their children who went missing and returned to them as strangers, forever changed by their other-worldly forays. But what Eleanor West offers is a place where the children can be themselves as they wait for their doors to open for them again. And if those doors don’t open, then she will help them become adults in our world. Each volume of the series focuses on different children, with the first one introducing us to this halfway house of sorts, while the rest end up opening the doors of certain worlds for us readers. Each one is different, with their own rules and their own sets of dangers that make you realize what happens to some of the children who don’t return to our world.
In Come Tumbling Down, House residents Christopher, Kade, Sumi and Cora are surprised by the return of Jack Wilcott, who left them a while back when the door to the Moors opened and she carried through it the dead body of her murderous sister Jill. But this time, her fiancee Alexis is with her and Jack is in the body of Jill. Forced to swap bodies so that Jill can fulfill her dream of becoming a vampire, Jack asks for help so she can get her body back and continue to live her life at the Moors.
In reading the Wayward Children series, readers are bound to have a particular favorite among the children or the worlds. While Lundy‘s story in In an Absent Dream is probably my top pick in the series, I liked Down Among the Sticks and Bones that featured the Wilcott twin’s life in the Moors prior to the events of the first book, and where their lives took very different paths away from each other. It featured familiar monsters to readers, particularly the mad scientist and the vampire, but with a fresh take as to how they come together in this world. In Come Tumbling Down, there is more of an expansion to how the Moors works, with Jack and Jill’s actions potentially undoing the balance or the power play of the supposed leaders of their world.
While I expected the adventure and the final decision Jack has to make about her deranged sister, I didn’t expect that the story would give much weight to the state of Jack’s mental health following the forced body swap. This gives her quest to return to her body (because I don’t think anybody will ever root for Jill) even more urgency, and a cause for concern beyond maintaining the Moor’s balance that was more important for this particular reader. There’s always going to be an off-kilter, even crazy, quality to the children who travel through magical doors, but to actually put a name and a description of what can happen when said mental health issue is not addressed is something I appreciated in this volume of the series.
While the Wayward Children Series might not be for every fantasy reader, I found myself enjoying the smaller measure of storytelling that the book series offers. It encourages readers to imagine what other experiences the children may have had or what else their respective adventure worlds have in store for us. I look forward to future volumes of the series, and join in on the popular clamor to expand on Kade’s story, and hopefully give Eleanor West the new chapter she deserves.
Happy reading!
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