Review: Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am fortunate to have received an Advanced Review Copy of this book.

When we last saw twins Jack and Jill Walcott in Every Heart a Doorway, McGuire's Nebula Award winning novella, a killer had been outed, and Jack was finally free, due to various developments, to return to the home of her heart, The Moors, a world of mad science, vampires and werewolves. Sumi, Nancy's ill-fated roommate, had once admonished her that "You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell your story is you." Well, it turns out if you're an identical twin that it's a little more complicated than that. You might find your story is inextricably interwoven with that of your sibling and neither of you can quite manage to have things exactly as you wish.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the second of McGuire's Wayward Children books in a series that tells us about portals to other worlds (be they doorways or trunks with stairs going down, down, down) and the children who find those worlds. Jack and Jill enter the world of The Moors on a rainy, boring afternoon, from the portal of their loving grandmother's trunk, which is located in the attic of their asphyxiating, sterile family home. At first, you may be puzzled, if you have recently read Every Heart a Doorway, by the seeming role reversals of the twins, because as raised by their parents, Jillian is raised by parental dictates to be a tomboy and Jacquelyn is forced into the role of a girly girl. (This all occurs after being cruelly separated from their loving grandmother, who raised them for the first five years of their lives.) The Moors sets it all right, except for the part where Jill becomes a little, um, "ruthless," something that will be no surprise to readers of the first Wayward Children book.

Less a sequel than a prequel (since we see the lives Jack and Jill led before arriving at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children) Down Among the Sticks and Bones was more compelling than its predecessor to me because rather than providing us with mystery, the story provides us with a deeper backstory that makes us empathize with both girls.

Three lovely illustrations by Rovina Cai accompanied my ARC, and I loved the touch that the illustrations only present views of the world of The Moors, a point which I found reminiscent of the film version of The Wizard of Oz giving us a color version of Oz. The Moors is the real world of Jack and Jill Wolcott. And it's a fearsome, wonderful place, where Jack finds love, friendship and true knowledge and Jill finds the limits of love are more inflexible than she might have thought.

This isn't a conventional children's book, but it is a book that weaves yet another dark and beautiful fairytale.

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