Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children #2), by Seanan McGuire

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not the heartbreak of coming back, but the origin story I did not really need


I opened my review of the first instalment, “Every Heart a Doorway”, with the line “Not the fantasy of going through the door, but the heartbreak of coming back.”

“Down Among the Sticks and Bones” turns that idea inside out. This time, Seanan McGuire gives us the fantasy of going through the door, tracing the origins of Jack and Jill in a story that reaches for the shape, logic, and menace of a fairy tale. For me, though, that shift is precisely where the novella loses some of what made its predecessor so affecting.

»On the day our story truly starts«

That line captures one of my main frustrations with the book. By the time the story “truly” starts, more than a fifth of the novella has already passed, and I felt that delay. I understood what McGuire was trying to do by showing the damage inflicted on the sisters before they ever reach the Moors, but the setup is so insistently arranged like a fairy tale that it rarely feels surprising. “Every Heart a Doorway” took portal fantasy and twisted it into something mournful, strange, and emotionally bruised. “Down Among the Sticks and Bones” is much more straightforward. It is, essentially, a fairy tale in modern dress, and I am not much of a fairy-tale person.

That would matter less if this particular fairy tale felt richer or less formulaic. Instead, it gives us a horrible vampire lord, a “mad scientist” who never seems especially mad, drowned gods and werewolves that are mentioned only briefly, and villagers whose likely fates are exactly as grim as expected. The book gestures towards a more expansive and uncanny world than the one it actually explores. Again and again, I had the feeling that the most interesting corners of the Moors were left just outside the frame.

»A floor below them, Chester and Serena slept peacefully, untroubled by their choices. They had two daughters: they had two girls to mold into whatever they desired. The thought that they might be harming them by forcing them into narrow ideas of what a girl, of what a person, should be had never crossed their minds«

This is where the novella is strongest. McGuire is sharp on parental cruelty, gendered expectation, and the quiet violence of treating children as designs rather than people. In those moments, the book has real bite. But although Jack and Jill are explained thoroughly, they are not, to my mind, deepened in proportion to the page time spent on them. I loved reading about them later, in the first book, more than I loved seeing their origin laid out here.

Compared with other portal fantasies, this feels slighter and less haunting than it wants to be. Compared with “Every Heart a Doorway”, it is also less emotionally piercing, less peculiar, and much less necessary. I was not especially happy with it, but I will still very likely read the next instalment.

Three stars out of five.


Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam




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