Book Review: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Rating: ★★★★☆

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Tor

Publication Date: June 13, 2017

This is book two in the Wayward Children series.

Click here for my review of Every Heart a Doorway.

The same Jack and Jill from the nursery rhyme, only older, darker, both female, and living in a world that threatens to destroy them.

Jacqueline and Jillian were the ideal little girls for their parents, Serena and Chester, who viewed the idea of procreation as a way to further advance both of their careers. One girl for each, to mold as they will. The idea of asking what the girls wanted, or even the thought that they might want anything different at all, never crossed either of their minds.

So when the twins find a staircase in an old trunk in their house, they descend, without looking back. The door they find reads ‘Be Sure,’ and they are, as far as they know. The world they find on the other side is High Logic, High Wicked, but of course, they don’t know that yet. It isn’t long before they find out. No one in this world is as they seem, least of all the twins, who shake off the molds their parents forced them into and learn to find their own way in this dangerous, new world.

• There’s more Jack! I’ve said before that I find her an irresistible character, and it’s still true. I was actually thrilled to find out that this delves more into their story, because Jack and Jill have quite a fascinating one.

 

• There is so much more depth to this story. As with all characters, there’s more than initially meets the eye. McGuire presented one side of the girls in Every Heart a Doorway, but like with every good character, they have a past. I loved the peek into what Jack and Jill’s early years were like, why they were lured by a doorway in the first place, and how they morphed into the girls they were in the first book. The transformation was spectacular, yet perfectly natural at the same time.
  

 

• The world is absolutely marvelous. Not in the sense that I want to visit, mind you. There will be no doors leading there for me, thanks. But McGuire really brought the world to life for me, laid out all the dangers and manipulations and created a place that was as beautiful as it was terrifying. The world made perfect sense, and how the girls found their true selves in it was equally well done.

• The diversity in this one feels more forced. Dare I say, it borders on tropes. Of course Jack would be lesbian, because she’s a girl that dresses like a boy and likes science. No, I don’t think that’s what the author intended, but that’s how it came across to me simply because it’s a cliche that’s done too often for me to not have noticed in it. And her love interest is fat, but that’s okay, of course, because Jill loves her anyway, even though everyone else in the book seems to go out of their way to point out how fat she is. Neither of these things would have had me bat an eye in general, but the way they were pushed felt very after-school special instead of just being a part of the character. All I want is diversity without it feeling forced, without it being diversity for diversity’s sake. As if, you know, these are real people that exist as more than just the things that make them diverse. Is that too much to ask?

 

• Whyyyyy end it there? Gosh, this irked me so much. I was totally on board with taking a step back from book one and going backward to learn about Jack and Jill. However, this one ends before the first one even takes place. And it just ends. All of a sudden. Boom. Fade to black. I had an overwhelming feeling of that’s it? This book did nothing to further the plot of the whole series.

I was actually kind of disappointed with this book. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good book, and I’ll for sure be reading the third, but I guess I expected more. I thought it would tie into the first book in some way, but aside from using two of the same characters, it doesn’t. This has the potential to be a fully stand-alone book, which is not what I expected from this series, especially the second book in the series. In the first one, they go back to the world from this book, so when I saw that Down Among the Sticks and Bones was about Jack and Jill, I thought that surely it would loop around and make a full circle to tie into the end of the first book. Wrong!

So, didn’t totally live up to my expectations. Not a bad book, though, and I’d still recommend it. Just know that it feels less like a part of a series and more like a stand-alone.

What do you think of the Wayward Children series? If you found a magical doorway, would you go through it? If you did, what do you think your ideal world be—High Logic or Nonsense and High Wicked or Virtue?