Reading: Down Among the Sticks and Bones (21/365)

Seanan McGuire's Down Among the Sticks and Bones, the second in her Wayward Children series, is actually a prequel to the first, Every Heart a Doorway. It focuses on the twins Jack and Jill, who appeared in Every Heart a Doorway, and tells the story of their childhoods and their experience in the bleakly beautiful fantasy world of the Moors, before they returned to our world and ended up at Eleanor West's school.

McGuire's depiction of the twins' early life, with parents who never learnt to think of their children as people, is darkly comic, recounted by an omniscient narrator with a tendency to arch parenthetical asides (you need to enjoy arch parenthetical asides to like this book, I think, but anyone who has read anything I have ever written can tell where I fall on that spectrum, I say in an arch parenthetical aside), while the story of their time in the Moors is atmospheric and a little unsettling. The overall impression is of a dark fairy tale with an underlying theme of the damage done by trying to push people into rigid gender roles. I don't think I enjoyed it quite as much as I enjoyed Every Heart a Doorway, and I wished that Jill in particular had had more character development, but it was an interesting grown-up take on the stuff of children's fantasy.