Title: In an Absent Dream
Series: Wayward Children #4
Author: Seanan McGuire
Genre: Portal Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Death mentions, mild body horror (humans transforming into birds), mention of periods
Spoiler Warning: Even though this book is fourth in a series, this story takes place before the events of the first book and there are no spoilers in this review!
Back Cover:
This fourth entry and prequel tells the story of Lundy, a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should.
When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she’s found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.
Review:
Seanan McGuire wrote this series to be specifically relatable to me, personally, I swear. I know I talked about how Jack and Jill’s childhood in Down Among the Sticks and Bones was relatable, but Lundy – just the character of Lundy herself – is basically me.
Lundy didn’t have any friends because her father was the principal of her school (I didn’t have a lot of friends because my mother was in charge of everything I was involved in). Lundy preferred fiction to reality and always had her nose in a book (so did I). Lundy was a stickler for rules because rules made sense and they made the world safer (same). If Seanan had wanted to put a representation of me before age 18 into a book, she couldn’t have done much better of a job. So naturally I felt very invested in Lundy and her adventures.
The Goblin Market that Lundy gets sent to is a fantastic world. It has strict rules about exchanging “fair value” in every exchange, and if you don’t give fair value in a trade you take on Debt, which is … very bad. It can be a bit confusing at first, especially with the Archivist character mostly info-dumping things onto Lundy, but for the most part you figure it out along with Lundy. It’s an amazing and creative place to explore.
My main problem with the book is that it’s short and it skips over so many things that could have been interesting to read about. For example, on Lundy’s first foray into the Goblin Market, she and her friends do battle with a giant wasp queen and one of her friends dies – but you learn about all of this in dialogue after the fact and don’t get to see any of that adventure. This book skips over entire years full of adventures in a matter of paragraphs and it could have been so much longer.
This was a good book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and even though I knew roughly how it ended (thanks to having read Every Heart a Doorway), it was still sad. I have no idea who the fifth book is going to be about, but this entire series has been great and I’m excited to continue it.
Bluejay Reads 