Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Come Tumbling Down

The Wayward Children books have turned into such a great series ... and here's #5! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children was an island of misfit toys, a place to put the unfinished stories and the broken wanderers who could butcher a deer and string a bow but no longer remembered what to do with indoor plumbing. It was also, more importantly, a holding pen for heroes. Whatever they might have become when they’d been cast out of their chosen homes, they’d been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.

Come Tumbling Down, the fifth installment in Seanan McGuire’s WAYWARD CHILDREN YA fantasy series, returns to the conflicted relationship between twins Jack (Jacqueline) and Jill Wolcott, in a some-months-later sequel to where we left them at the end of Every Heart a Doorway. (Down Among the Sticks and Bones is a prequel that tells their story in much more detail, though it’s the second book published in the series.) To recap — spoiler alert for the first and second books here — as children Jack and Jill had found their way to a portal world called the Moors, where Jack was raised by a … if not mad, at least highly peculiar … scientist, and Jill was raised by a master vampire to be his daughter and heir, before they returned to our world and spent some time turning the Home for Wayward Children upside down. When they returned to the Moors at the end of Every Heart a Doorway, Jill was dead at Jack’s hand, but Jack was confident that she could resurrect her sister once they returned to the Moors and, perhaps more important, that because Jill had died and been brought back to life, she would no longer be able to be turned into a vampire.

But Jill is not in the least repentant of her lethal lifestyle, and she and her adoptive vampire father have thought of an ingenious way to get around this limitation. What she’s now done is beyond the pale — not only is it ruining Jack’s life, pushing her to the edge of a mental breakdown, but it’s likely to lead to an imbalance of power and deadly warfare in the Moors world. So Jack, with her girlfriend Alexis, returns to the Wayward Children home to get help from her old friends. Did Eleanor say “no quests”? Oh well!

Come Tumbling Down didn’t quite reach the heights of my favorite books in the series, Down Among the Sticks and Bones and In an Absent Dream, but it comes quite close. McGuire does a great job examining Jack and Jill’s deeply troubled hearts. Jack, brilliant but burdened with OCD, has found joy in the mad scientist lifestyle, at least until the most recent troubles. She calls herself a monster, and in some ways that’s true, but she’s more or less a good-hearted person, if obsessive and demanding. Jill, though, is on a whole different level.

Jill had always been the more dangerous, less predictable Wolcott, for all that she was the one who dressed in pastel colors and lace and sometimes remembered that people liked it when you smiled. Something about the way she’d wrapped her horror movie heart in ribbons and bows had reminded him of a corpse that hadn’t been properly embalmed, like she was pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside. Terrifying and subtly wrong.

Joining Jack on her quest to set things right again in Jack’s life and in the Moors world are several familiar faces, including Kade (the one-time goblin prince), Christopher (who longs for the magical skeleton world of Mariposa), Cora (the former mermaid with the blue-green hair) and Sumi. They all bring their unique characters and talents to the story. The most delightful was Sumi, whose flighty behavior and off-the-wall comments conceal a sharp mind. She calls the crimson moon in the Moors “the sugared cherry on the biggest murder sundae in the whole world” and is serenely confident that one day she’ll find her way back to the world called Confection, where the gummy worms will eat her body when she dies.

Come Tumbling Down is a quest type of adventure novel, mixing together friendship and horror. It’s lifted above the norm by the quirkiness of the characters, by the tragedy of the broken relationship between twin sisters Jack and Jill, and by Seanan McGuire’s insightful commentary. She muses on what would have happened if Jack had become the vampire’s protégé rather than Jill, and the ruthless business tycoon Sumi would have become if she hadn’t found the door to Confection as a young girl. And she shows us how wayward children can be heroes. Sometimes, even, the monsters are the heroes.

I received a free ebook for review from the publisher and NetGalley. Thanks so much!

Initial post: I HAVE THE ARC! *does happy dance* *throws confetti in air* Update: And I read the whole thing in one evening. #noregrets