TITLE: Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)
AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire
208 pages, Tor.com Books, ISBN 9780765399311 (Hardcover)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): The fifth installment in Seanan McGuire’s award-winning Wayward Children series, Come Tumbling Down picks up the threads left dangling by Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones. When Jack left Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children she was carrying the body of her deliciously deranged sister – whom she had recently murdered in a fit of righteous justice – back to their home on the Moors. But death in their adopted world isn’t always as permanent as it is here, and when Jack herself is carried back into the school, it becomes clear that something has happened to her. Something terrible. Something of which only the maddest of scientists could conceive. Something only her friends are equipped to help her overcome. Eleanor West’s “No Quests” rule is about to be broken. Again.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Note: I received a print uncorrected proof Advance Review Copy from the publisher.
The latest entry in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series returns us to my favorite of the Portal worlds we’ve seen so far: the Moors. In Down Among the Sticks and Bones, we witnessed the twins Jack and Jill’s arrival in the Moors and their subsequent adoption, for lack of a better term, by The Master (a vampire) and Doctor Bleak (a mad scientist). The Moors is a very Gothic / 1920s Universal Monsters / 1960s Hammer Horror type of world; everything feels black-and-white and saturated with color at the same time. Supernatural creatures exist side-by-side with lightning-based mad science. The Master has the regal bearing of Lugosi combined with the physical menace of Lee, Doctor Bleak could easily be Peter Cushing. It’s not that The Master and the Doctor are one-dimensional pastiches so much that McGuire describes them in ways that bring your favorite or most frightening (often the same thing, don’t you think?) versions of vampires and mad scientists to mind. In Come Tumbling Down, McGuire expands what we know of the Moors, introducing a Lovecraftian Mythos aspect to the world via the Drowned Gods and the cult/villagers that worship them. And we get to meet another “wayward child,” Gideon, who is the current high priest of the Drowned Gods. McGuire has mad science, gothic horror, and cosmic horror overlap throughout the book, contrasting the different types of horror and the effect they have on the reader.
I don’t want to say too much about the characters of Jack and Jill lest I spoil aspects of Down Among the Sticks and Bones for people who haven’t read it. I can say that this book showcases McGuire’s ability to craft nuanced portrayals of neuro-atypical characters that help those of us who don’t have those traits to understand them, and perhaps relate to them, a little bit better. Jack’s germophobia and body dysmorphia and each twins’ need to not be who they were before they arrived in the Moors are so well-drawn. This extends to the other characters as well: Christopher’s social awkwardness/anxiety and discomfort with bodily fluids, Cora’s connection to water, Sumi being somewhere on the Autism spectrum, Kade being transgender – all are written in the non-judgmental way McGuire is known for. This is a truly diverse cast not just in physicality and in ethnicity but in neuroicity (is that a word?) as well.
The Wayward Children series is set up so that “present day” books, usually built around a quest or a character attempting to return to the world they’ve lost, alternate with “past times” books that show how characters got to their portal world and what they experienced before returning to our world. This book builds off of events in the first and second books. I don’t think one necessarily needs to have read the third (Beneath the Sugar Sky, a present-day quest into the land of Confection) or fourth (In An Absent Dream, a times-past chronicle about a supporting character who doesn’t appear in Come Tumbling Down at all), although reading Beneath the Sugar Sky will help understand where the characters of Kade, Christopher, Sumi and Cora are coming from as they enter this latest adventure. As a rule, I tend to enjoy novels that alternate chapters between the present and the past to build tension. I absolutely love that McGuire is structuring this novella series this way. It means that the books can be read in almost any order, mixed and matched upon re-reads. And I suspect that the reader will notice different things in each book depending on the order of the reread.
I suspect this will be our final foray into the Moors because Jack and Jill’s combined story now has a beginning (Down Among the Sticks and Bones), a middle (Every Heart a Doorway) and an end (Come Tumbling Down). But I really hope I’m wrong. I want to know more about Gideon and how he became the High Priest of the Drowned Gods. I want to know what The Master will do next. And I really want to know more about the werewolves in the hills and whether this world also has living mummies and other classic monster types.
And regardless of whether this is the last trip to the Moors, it is not the last book in the series. There are so many characters and worlds to explore: Christopher’s Mariposa, Cora’s The Deeps, Kade’s goblin world. I look forward to all of those trips, as well as future “present day” quests for the characters and more insight into what is happening with Eleanor West herself.
Come Tumbling Down releases in hardcover in January, 2020. The first four books in the series are available now.