Personalized Magic

The Wayward Children Series

As of this month, I have finished reading all the books in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series (Well, all but book 3, which doesn’t interest me). As many of you share my love of magical worlds and the normal people who stumble into them, I thought I’d give an extended recommendation as well as explain what I like so much about them.

Worldbuilding x10

Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, Percy Jackson. The “doors” that we are familiar with all lead to one specific world. The genius of this series is that each character in the series has their own door and their own world, so if you don’t really connect with one, there are others. You can choose which one you like best, kind of like how Harry Potter fans identified with one of Hogwarts’ houses. I’m a Ravenclaw, btw.

Book 1 begins in a school for children who have fallen through a door, spent time in another world, and then come back to this one…changed. It perfectly taps into fairy tale vibes while also channeling teen angst (without going overboard. One of my favorite reviews called it:

“Girl Interrupted meets Grimm's Fairy Tales. Let it in and it will touch your heart and open your mind.” ―Geek Syndicate

There’s a character for every aesthetic and taste.

• Nancy went to the halls of the dead, a perfect goth heaven that left her with a white streak in her hair and a dislike of eating anything other than pomegranate juice.

• Sumi went to Confection, a nonsense world filled with sugar and spice, and some things that aren’t so nice.

• Jack & Jill (Jaqueline and Jillian) are twin sisters who went to The Moors, a desolate land of monsters where they became monsters themselves, just very different ones.

• Lundy went to the Goblin Market, where getting fair value for everything was of paramount importance, and the consequences were dire for those who fell afoul of the rules.

I found myself most interested in The Moors and the twins’ adventures, but I also enjoyed the other worlds. The genius of having so many doors leading to so many varied worlds (and Eleanor’s school, which brings them all together), is that there is something for everyone.

Representation without Screeching

You have likely detected that I don’t much care for the idea of creating a fictional story that only serves to bolster ideology. I don’t like it one bit, and many other people share my distaste of it, hence the slogan: Get Woke, Go Broke.

HOWEVER… sometimes as readers (and tv watchers), our Woke radar can become so over-sensitive that it can seem like any representation of minority characters can be a turnoff. But McGuire doesn’t fall into the annoying perils of wokery in her books, even as she has a wide array of different sorts of troubled teens. And her books thrive because of it.

There are no Mary Sues here. Being plus-sized or LGBT does not equal being a precious, perfect character who never grows or learns. Being a female doesn’t make you inherently more moral or smarter than being male. McGuire does not denigrate one group to lift up another. She writes real people who have experienced something exceptional, and struggle now that it’s over.

Short & Well-Written

As an audiobook fan, there’s nothing that makes my heart sink more than seeing a 26-hour run time. All of these books run between 3 and 4 hours on audiobook, so the paperback or Kindle versions will be fairly short as well. This is insanely valuable as we are all busy, we all like good books, but we don’t all have as much time as we’d like to read. You can also skip around. Start with book 1, obviously. But after that, you don’t have to stay in order. Like I mentioned earlier, I didn’t read book 3 because I don’t really connect with Sumi. But that’s okay, because the subsequent books explain what happened in the previous ones, so you can skip around as you like. As my schedule gets crazier (hello, home renovation), I become ever-more fond of short fiction.

I highly recommend the series and, if you’ve already read some or all, I’d love to hear what your favorite “doorway” is.

You can get book 1 of the Wayward Children series here.