Come Tumbling Down

September 9, 2019
The dark, beguiling fifth entry in McGuire’s Wayward Children series, about a boarding school for visitors from portal worlds, continues the story of polar opposite twin sisters Jack and Jill Wolcott from the second book, 2017’s Down Among the Sticks and Bones. Back in their menacing home world, the Moors, sensible Jack has no higher ambition than to apprentice to the scientist Dr. Bleak and settle down with her reanimated fiancée, while deranged Jill dreams of being adopted by the vampire Master. Jill’s body, which died and was reanimated once before, is unable to become a vampire, so to achieve her dream Jill betrays her sister, forcing Jack to undergo a painful procedure to swap their bodies. For Jack, who has OCD, being trapped in another’s form is a nightmare. She enlists the help of her old friends at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children to get her body back before Jill and the Master destroy the Moors entirely. Themes of sacrifice, love, and hope weave through this grim yet achingly tender tale. New and returning readers alike will be enthralled.

Starred review from November 1, 2019

Going home is all that the students living at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children wanted. Jack Wolcott succeeded, after killing her twin sister, Jill, and carrying her back to the Moors where they belonged. In the Moors, death is not necessarily the end. Now Jack is the one being carried, back to the school, in the arms of her love, Alexis--and in Jill's body. Identical twin aside, Jack wants her own body back, and her friends at Eleanor West's school are ready to break the rules again to make sure their former schoolmate gets everything her heart desires. Themes of dysphoria and gender are smartly inserted through McGuire's rich prose, with heartfelt scenes keeping each character from getting lost in the action. VERDICT The fifth volume of the "Wayward Children" series (after In an Absent Dream) gives readers the epic ending (is it really the end?) of Jack and Jill's story line. Once again, McGuire gives readers a starkly poignant tale of longing, love, and belonging.--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
The ghoulishly dysfunctional Wolcott twins--mad scientist Jack and her sister, Jill, who aspires to be a vampire--return for the fifth Wayward Children novel (In an Absent Dream, 2019, etc.). Through a door etched by lightning, Jack reappears at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a refuge for those children who found a portal to one of many magical worlds but couldn't cope when they wound up back on Earth again. Jack isn't quite who she was when she first left; she's presently stuck in the resurrected body of Jill, whom Jack had previously killed in order to put an end to Jill's targeted slaughter campaign at the school. Meanwhile, Jill's mind inhabits Jack's still-living flesh, thanks to a coerced body-swap instigated by Jill's vampire master. This state of affairs is distressing for two main reasons: 1. Jack has obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifests in a pathological fear of being dirty, physically and mentally, and can't be comfortable in Jill's mass-murdering body, and 2. The resurrected can't become vampires, so Jill plans to use her sister's more vital body for that purpose. Accompanied by her twice-resurrected lover, Alexis, and several students, Jack goes home to her beloved world of the Moors, a blood-tinged and gothically gloomy mashup of Stoker, Shelley, and Lovecraft, to confront her narcissistic, body-stealing twin while her schoolmates must dodge the Moors' deadly traps and haunting temptations. McGuire (Middlegame, 2019, etc.) specializes in lending equal richness to her worldbuilding and her characterizations; these are real people dumped into fantastical situations. In this novel, she examines the thin line separating heroes from monsters--and then blurs that line completely. As in the other series installments, she also argues that one's real or perceived flaws can prove to be a source of strength despite, or even because of, the pain they cause to oneself and others. Grotesque, haunting, lovely.

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November 15, 2019
Eleanor West's rule is no quests. Nobody comes back to her world, except for Jack, carried by a silent stranger. When Jack left, she was carrying her murderous sister. What happened to Jack is something only a monster would conceive and only a mad scientist could do: and it will take nothing less than a quest to solve it. The group that returns to the Moors with Jack includes familiar faces?friends of Jack's, if Jack could be said to have friends. They will encounter monsters, familiar things made strange by the rules of the Moors, and a fight in which even victory is terrible. McGuire continues to write magnificent worlds with a wonderful variety of characters in the Wayward Children series (beginning with Every Heart a Doorway, 2016), and handles questions of body and identity, and the consequences of finding a magical world that is home and then returning to this one, with grace and consideration. The illustrations are a perfect accompaniment to McGuire's beautiful subversions of the genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)