Down Among the Sticks and Bones

If Every Heart a Doorway was a great revelation - not so much of Seanan McGuire's writing skills, since for me they are a given, but rather of her amazing range in storytelling - this new installment in her Wayward Children series subverted, again, my expectations.

I might have looked for more detail on Ms. Eleanor West's home and its pupils, or on the stories of their long road to recovery after coming back to our primary world, but what I found instead was a sort of of... upside-down tale, if you want, one where the "before" has just as much impact on the characters as the time in the world beyond the doorway, or the difficult adaptation once the protagonist find themselves back in their place of origin.

This is mainly a story about abused childhood, not in the sense of physical or mental torture, but - worse still - about the way in which parental expectations can mold children, bending them in shapes and directions contrary to their true nature and leanings. That such shaping can be carried out in the name of the kids' own good, therefore hiding (or giving an alibi to) the parents' selfish desires, makes this story all the more poignant in its subtly understated cruelty.

Chester and Serena are not parent material by a long shot: wrapped in their individual worlds - work, career and social standing - that sometimes overlap giving a sort of meaning to their marriage, they at some point decide that to complete the perfect picture presented to they world they need a child. Serena wants the perfect girl, one to be dressed and pampered like a favorite doll; Chester wants a boy, one with whom he can share sports and manly pursuits. They are however gifted with twin girls, Jacqueline and Jillian, so promptly proceed to shape them into the mold each one desires, in an ultimate show of unconscious defiance against fate: Jacqueline ends up being the doll, frozen into her perfect dresses that must not be mussed or dirtied, while Jillian is driven toward sports and a more carefree, boyish attitude. This creates a rift between the sisters, one that effects their actual separation once they stumble into the magical world accessed through their grandmother's trunk in the attic, and this rift will have terrible consequences...

While I was reading Jacqueline and Jillian's formative journey, I was struck by what came across as barely repressed anger and contempt toward these selfishly distant parents, wondering more than once whether the author was drawing her models from some real life example she witnessed firsthand: my experience with her writing has helped me learn that McGuire never "preaches" to her audience, letting the story speak for itself (something I greatly appreciate), and this is the case here as well, but still the depth and intensity of feelings - that quickly took hold of my own reactions as well - goes quite beyond the usual scale, hinting at something more profound and with higher emotional impact.

Like bonsai being trained into shape by an assiduous gardener, they were growing into the geometry of their parents' desires, and it was pushing them further and further away from one another. One day, perhaps, one of them would reach across the gulf and find that there was no one there.

The "monsters" the two sisters encounter once in the Moors, beyond the doorway, are indeed scary - the Master much more than Dr. Bleak, and that's all I'm going to say, because they must be discovered on their own - and require the two girls to change and adapt to survive in the weirdly frightening environment, but at the same time they give Jacqueline and Jillian the freedom to choose what they want to be, to take steps in the direction they want to go. You could say that both the Master and Dr. Bleak love their wards, and care for them - even in the twisted way that's the norm in the Moors - just as their real parents don't: Chester and Serena's great sin is to be incapable of love, and - as McGuire tells us in what sounds like an open accusation - to have taken that ability from their daughters.

"It must be awful to have such a dorky sister," said the girls in their class to Jacqueline, who felt like she should defend her sister, but didn't know how. Her parents had never given her the tools for loyalty, for sticking up or standing up [...]

This is a story that insinuates in your mind and soul and leaves deep traces (or should I call them 'scars'?), whether Jack and Jill's plight has a personal resonance for you or more simply draws you in because of its compelling development. At times, it broke my heart, but I would not have missed it for anything in the world: no one can pull you into their worlds like Seanan McGuire, indeed.