Goddammit Seanan McGuire you’ve done it again. There’s a reason she’s one of my all time favorite authors and it’s because she never fails to disappoint.
Seanan has a few different series, all of which I love. Across the Green Grass Fields belongs to her Doorway novellas. Essentially, Seanan created a meta fiction for all of those stories of kids stumbling into other worlds and having adventures. In her universe, children find their doors. These doors, if entered, sweep the child away to one of an infinite number of worlds, for years at a time. The books are about the children who stumble back to our world, and how they cope.
I love this series. I always wondered how the children from Chronicles of Narnia felt, growing to be adult kings and queens, only to find themselves in their preteen bodies again, powerless, back on Earth. I know I wouldn’t handle it well. In Seanan’s books, one woman who came back to Earth and never could find her door back to her chosen home starts a school for children like her.
The other great part? These books are diverse AF. There are lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, trans kids, and in the latest addition, an intersex girl dealing with puberty. Each is treated as an individual who’s sexual orientation is but one mere facet of many that makes up who they are.
And the plots are heartbreaking and exciting and funny and creative and omg just read the books already. Start with Every Heart a Doorway. Keep going until you hit Across the Green Grass Fields. Then please try to resist sending me hate mail because you have a new addiction and have to wait for the next installment. I’m suffering right along with you, believe me.
I am behind on both Toby Daye and the Wayward Children books, but I will catch up. I love the worlds she builds.
your enthusiasm got me. I’ll try it out 🙂