Title: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known
Series: Wayward Children, #9
Author: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Tor
Publication date: January 9, 2024
Length: 160 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher

Dinosaurs and portals, and a girl who can find both in the latest book in the Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning series.

Antsy is the latest student to pass through the doors at Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children.

When her fellow students realize that Antsy’s talent for finding absolutely anything may extend to doors, she’s forced to flee in the company of a small group of friends, looking for a way back to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go to be sure that Vineta and Hudson are keeping their promise.

Along the way, temptations are dangled, decisions are reinforced, and a departure to a world populated by dinosaurs brings untold dangers and one or two other surprises!

A story that reminds us that finding what you want doesn’t always mean finding what you need.

What can you say about the 9th book in a series? Other than that’s it’s terrific, of course! The book opens with a paragraph that beautifully sums up the overarching plot of the series:

Children of the doors know about being mislaid. They are well-acquainted with stepping through an opening or following a passage that should lead from here to there, and finding themselves someplace entirely else, someplace entirely new. It is possibly their only truly unifying experience, the one thing they have so completely in common that there’s no need to even question it: once upon a time, they took an impossible step, opened an impossible portal, and ended up in a terribly, horribly possible place.

As the newest Wayward Children book, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known keeps the overarching storylines of the series moving forward while introducing some new twists, rules, and situations for the characters to deal with. Some of the installments in the series have more of a stand-alone feel, although they’re all connected, but this is not one of those. Mislaid is absolutely a sequel, mainly in regard to book #8 and its main character Antsy, but it also continues the stories of several other characters, and it’s helpful (I’d even say critical) to be familiar with them.

The previous book, Lost in the Moment and Found, focused on a young girl named Antsy, who runs away from a dangerous situation in her home and finds herself in the world of a store that’s actually a nexus point between worlds. Antsy’s new home in the store is mostly delightful — she’s safe, after all, and has the opportunity to visit countless new worlds through the portal doors that appear and disappear. But, as she discovers by the end of the book, there’s a price to be paid, and the book ends with Antsy returning, quite changed, to her home world and finding her way to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.

In Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, Antsy is settling in at the school, but doesn’t actually quite fit. She’s actually much younger than the other students, and their portal worlds are all so different that she can’t seem to connect with many of them. When a particularly dangerous student threatens Antsy’s safety, she and a handful of others escape through another door and begin a new quest.

Readers of the prior books in the series will be familiar with Antsy’s companions — Sumi, Kade, Christopher, Cora and a few newer faces too. As they flee, they’re also searching for possibilities. Most of the students yearn to return “home” — that is, to their lost worlds beyond the doors — and Antsy has the unique ability to find any door. So if they can actually go home, should they?

There are some interesting discussions about what it means to be sure about a choice, and how they’ll know when or if they’re ready, as well as conversations about whether someone truly still belongs in the place they consider home. These introspective bits are lovely, as the various characters get a chance to shine and express themselves, even in the midst of fleeing from dangerous goblins and dinosaurs.

Yes, dinosaurs. The cover doesn’t lie! The group does visit a primeval world populated by dinosaurs, and it’s amazing. I’m not going into further detail — read it and find out!

The challenge I had with this book, as hinted at earlier, is keeping track of the characters. Yes, I’ve read the entire series so far, but since they’re released at a rate of one per year, it’s been a few years since I’ve thought about some of these characters. Thank goodness there are wikis out there! I definitely had to go look up some backstories. At some point, rereading the whole series from the beginning might be a good idea!

If you’ve been curious about the Wayward Children series, I would recommend against starting with this book. It won’t make any sense! It’s such a great series, though, that I would strongly recommend picking up a copy of Every Heart a Doorway — I bet you’ll want to keep going!

I really enjoyed Mislaid in Parts Half-Known. It ends with certain characters spinning off into new directions, and leaves much still to be discovered in the wider world of the school. I can’t wait to find out where Wayward Children goes next.

Title: Lost in the Moment and Found
Series: Wayward Children, #8
Author: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Tor
Publication date: January 10, 2023
Length: 160 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher

A young girl discovers an infinite variety of worlds in this standalone tale in the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire, Lost in the Moment and Found.

Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go.

If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here.
If you ever wondered about favorite toy from childhood… it’s probably sitting on a shelf in the back.
And the headphones that you swore that this time you’d keep safe? You guessed it….

Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she finds that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds.

And stepping through those doors exacts a price.

Lost in the Moment and Found tells us that childhood and innocence, once lost, can never be found.

You might wonder whether, by the 8th book in a series, an author might run out of fresh stories to tell.

If the author is Seanan McGuire, then the answer is — not a chance! In Lost in the Moment and Found, she puts a fresh spin on the ongoing Wayward Children series, once again moving the focus to a completely new character in a completely new circumstance.

While all the Wayward Children books feature children who’ve had lousy childhoods in one way or another, the circumstances here are particularly awful — enough so that the author includes a note prior to the opening of the story:

While all the Wayward Children books have dealt with heavy themes and childhood traumas, this one addresses an all-too-familiar monster: the one that lives in your own home. Themes of grooming and adult gaslighting are present in the early text. As a survivor of something very similar, I would not want to be surprised by these elements where I didn’t expect them.

I just want to offer you this reassurance: Antsy runs. Before anything can actually happen, Antsy runs.

I have to say, I very much appreciated the warning. While the sense of dread builds in the early part of the book, at least I could proceed without fearing the absolute worst. And as the author promises, the main character, Antsy, does in fact run. When her fear and sense of isolation and lack of support gets to the point that she can no longer stand it, she finds a way out and escapes.

… as she got older, she would come to think that the ability to cry was the third thing she’d lost in a single day.

Antsy, at age six, a year after a terrible loss, gains a stepfather whom she never wanted, but she hopes her mother’s happiness will allow her to feel happy too. It doesn’t work that way. Her sense of wrongness and unease whenever she’s around her stepfather only continues to grow. He’s insidious, undermining Antsy in small ways through lies and contradictions, so that Antsy knows that if she goes to her mother with her big worries, she won’t be believed. It’s utterly heartbreaking.

When Antsy finally does reach her breaking point and runs away, she ends up at a strange little thrift shop that she never noticed before, with the words “Be Sure” written over the door frame. Once inside, the door she entered through disappears, and Antsy finds herself in a new home with an odd elderly woman and a talking magpie as companions.

As she stays in this store, she discovers new doors leading to new worlds, where she meets all sorts of strange and fascinating people and brings back more goods for the infinite shelves of the store she lives in. And for a long time, she forgets that there’s anything else out there and doesn’t think to question certain very odd occurrences…

Eventually, Antsy realizes that there’s a steep price to be paid for all the miraculous new worlds she visits — and that she may run out of options sooner than expected. The ending is moving and fitting, very sad, but with a small sliver of hope too.

Yes, I’m being vague!

As in all the Wayward Children books, the writing is simply gorgeous. These stories are never just straight-forward action — there’s a sense of mythic scope embedded in the descriptions of sad, lost children, and loss permeates so much of the storytelling.

The toll of childhood trauma becomes literal here: Antsy’s loss of safety and innocence leads to her new reality in the strange world of endless doors and lost things:

She should have had a childhood, ice cream and matinees and sunshine and cookies, not working in a dusty shop while she grew up faster than she should have been able to, rocketing toward adulthood, spending hours she’d never be able to recover! She should have had time. It was hers, and she had never agreed to give it away.

Antsy’s story is particularly tragic — obviously, no small child should ever have to doubt whether the one person they count on will actually believe them when they speak up. We can cheer Antsy on as she saves herself, but still, we can’t avoid mourning her shattered childhood and sense of faith in family and love.

As a whole, the Wayward Children series is beautiful, sad, emotional, and full of heartache and redemption. There’s hope and joy to offset the sorrow, but an undercurrent of sadness never quite leaves the stories or their characters.

I love the series, and I’m so happy that Lost in the Moment and Found lives up to my (very high) expectations. Please do start from the beginning if you haven’t read any of these yet! Each book is novella -length, but don’t rush through them — the lovely writing should be savored.