Title: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear
Series: Wayward Children, #10
Author: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Tor
Publication date: January 7, 2025
Length: 160 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley

Giant turtles, impossible ships, and tidal rivers ridden by a Drowned girl in search of a family in the latest in the bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire.

Nadya had three mothers: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her.

Nadya never considered herself less than whole, not until her adoptive parents fitted her with a prosthetic arm against her will, seeking to replace the one she’d been missing from birth.

It was cumbersome; it was uncomfortable; it was wrong.

It wasn’t her.

Frustrated and unable to express why, Nadya began to wander, until the day she fell through a door into Belyrreka, the Land Beneath the Lake–and found herself in a world of water, filled with child-eating amphibians, majestic giant turtles, and impossible ships that sailed as happily beneath the surface as on top. In Belyrreka, she found herself understood for who she was: a Drowned Girl, who had made her way to her real home, accepted by the river and its people.

But even in Belyrreka, there are dangers, and trials, and Nadya would soon find herself fighting to keep hold of everything she had come to treasure.

Adrift in Currents Clear and Clean is the 10th book in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and I’m pleased to say that the series is going strong. In fact, Adrift stands out as one of the best in the series, as far as I’m concerned.

In this 10th book, the story never actually ventures into Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, the setting that anchors the series and creates a connection between all of the books and their characters. Instead, Adrift tells the story of one particular Wayward Child, Nadya, and what happens to her in the world of Belyrreka.

Nadya is not a new character — although, if you’re like me, it might take more than a slight hint to put the pieces together. Readers of the series were introduced to Nadya in the 3rd book, Beneath the Sugar Sky. In that book, Nadya was a student at Eleanor West’s home, having gone through a portal to another world and then been returned to our own. Nadya, like the other characters in the series, was left to yearn for the world that feels like her true home and wait for the day when that world might call her back.

Adrift in Currents Clear and Clean takes us back to Nadya’s origin story. Abandoned at birth, Nadya is raised in a Russian orphanage — a bright child who thrives on caring for the other children and helping them find forever homes.

She was young and sweet and innocent and hard, in the way of children raised in job lots rather than individually; she was doing her best to be a good person, and to figure out what that meant in the context of the world she knew and had and understood.

Born without a right arm below the elbow, Nadya has never felt that she was disabled or missing anything at all; this is who she is, and she manages perfectly well. But at age nine, Nadya is finally adopted herself, by an American missionary couple who see taking in an imperfect child as a good deed. They don’t love her for herself; they love having her as proof of their own goodness.

Nadya’s new life in American is filled with things and luxuries that she wouldn’t have had in the land of her birth, and she knows that she must be compliant and grateful at all times — until the day that her adoptive parents take her to the doctor to receive a prosthetic arm. Nadya doesn’t want it — she’s fine as she is — but her objections don’t matter. She’s forced into wearing the prosthetic, which is clunky and hurts her skin. Now, for the first time, children at school see her as other; she’s not Nadya their playmate any longer, but the girl with the strange fake arm.

Miserable, Nadya goes for a walk to her favorite place, the turtle pond near her home. When she sees a strange shadow on the water that looks almost like a door, she leans in for a closer look, and falls in. Instead of drowning, Nadya wakes on the shores of a strange river in a strange world — and finds a wonderful place where she belongs, finds purpose and connection and true family, and knows that she’s finally home.

Nadya’s life in Belyrreka is wondrous. It’s a world of water — people live beneath the river and the lake, in cities where water has different weights. Some water is for breathing, some for swimming. Heavier water is deeper, and people ride boats and turtles through the lighter water to the dry world above, where they fish and farm and bring back sustenance to the cities. I can understand why Nadya would never want to leave Belyrreka — I would willingly have read much, much more about it.

Of course, if you’ve read Beneath the Sugar Sky, you’ll know that in that book, Nadya is introduced as a girl who returned from a watery world — so Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is a prequel, of sorts, to that book. We read Adrift knowing that Nadya will inevitably be wrenched away from Belyrreka. Seeing her happiness in this world is a special kind of sadness for the reader; we know that her time is limited, even if she does not.

Beneath the Sugar Sky also provides a coda to Nadya’s story in Adrift. When I finished Adrift — with a lump in my throat — I went back to Beneath the Sugar Sky and read the conclusion of Nadya’s part of that story. Without saying too much, I’ll just note that the payoff made my tears goes away!

Many readers note having uneven experiences with the Wayward Children series. For me, it’s been generally wonderful all the way through, although yes, some books in the series are more memorable or powerful or affecting than others. We all have our favorites — and now that I’ve read Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, I can say with certainty that it’s one of the best.

As I’ve said with my review of each books in the series, I highly recommend starting at the beginning and continuing from there. Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is a self-contained story that can be read on its own; there are no other characters or plotlines in it that require knowledge of earlier events in the series. Still, I recommend reading it as part of the whole, in order to get the full impact.

Nadya’s story is incredibly moving, and the world of Belyrreka is a delight. Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is a terrific addition to an inventive, always-changing series. Don’t miss it.

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.

Title: Where the Drowned Girls Go
Series: Wayward Children, #7
Author: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Tor
Publication date: January 4, 2022
Length: 150 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Source: ARC via Netgalley; hardcover purchased

Welcome to the Whitethorn Institute. The first step is always admitting you need help, and you’ve already taken that step by requesting a transfer into our company.

There is another school for children who fall through doors and fall back out again.
It isn’t as friendly as Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.

And it isn’t as safe.

When Eleanor West decided to open her school, her sanctuary, her Home for Wayward Children, she knew from the beginning that there would be children she couldn’t save; when Cora decides she needs a different direction, a different fate, a different prophecy, Miss West reluctantly agrees to transfer her to the other school, where things are run very differently by Whitethorn, the Headmaster.

She will soon discover that not all doors are welcoming…

If it’s January, it must be time for a new Wayward Children book!

Children have always been drawn to the doors.

In the 7th in the series, Where the Drowned Girls Go, the main character is Cora, whom we’ve met in previous installments as a secondary character. Here, she takes center stage.

Cora is a mermaid. That is, she was an ordinary human child until she went through a door to the world of the Trenches, an undersea world where Cora became a hero and a mermaid. Even though she was returned to her “real” world, she knows she belongs back in the Trenches… or she did, until (in book #5, Come Tumbling Down), she accompanies her friends through a door to the Moors, where she has a fateful encounter with the Drowned Gods.

She used to put her head down on the pillow and let the night take her away, off into dreams full of deep, diamond-dappled water, diving down where the currents were warm and the waters were always welcoming.

Since the Moors, though… since the Moors, her dreams were still full of water and waves, but the sea she swam in while she slept was no longer remotely kind. It was filled with teeth, and colder than she would have believed the water could be.

Now, back at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, Cora can’t shake the memories of the Moors and the awful whispers of the Drowned Gods, who want to drag her back down to their terror-filled realm. Feeling hopeless, Cora requests a transfer to the Whitethorn Institute, the other school for children who journey through portals to strange worlds and come back again. Against Eleanor West’s advice, Cora insists on the transfer, and soon finds herself in a very different type of school.

Days at the Whitethorn Institute always followed the same pattern, as perfect and predictable as a spider’s web.

At Whitethorn, the emphasis in on conformity. The students are urged through behavioral control to abandon any thought of other worlds. They must learn that this is the only world that exists, and give up the fantasies and delusions of other lives. It’s harsh, full of punishments and insistence on obedience, with an overwhelming grayness to it all.

But Cora is still a mermaid at heart, and soon comes to realize what an awful mistake she’s made. And when her friend Sumi shows up at Whitethorn on a rescue mission… well, things really get interesting.

I love the world of the Wayward Children, and despite the bleakness of the new school, there’s still plenty of magic and nonsense to appreciate in Where the Drowned Girls Go.

One of the truly special things about this series is how it celebrates otherness. The children in these books struggle to fit in in their “normal” worlds, and finding their doors is key to discovering who they truly are. What’s clear throughout this series is that the children’s differences aren’t the problem — the problem is a world that has no place for children who don’t conform.

As always, the writing is spectacular. Rovina Cai is back as the illustrator, and her drawings (again, as always) are beautiful and perfectly in tune with the narrative of the story.

I love this series so, so much. If you haven’t tried these books yet, start at the beginning! I’m thrilled that three more books in the series are listed on Goodreads — here’s hoping the Wayward Children thrive for years to come!