Down Among the Sticks & Bones (Wayward Children #2)

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Oh goodness, this was a beautiful book. I really enjoyed the first in the Wayward Children series "Every Heart a Doorway," but I may have loved this one more. Jack and Jill were such intriguing characters, so very tragic and dysfunctional that I really wanted to know their story.
And here it is, this second book in the series predates the first, so we see Jack & Jill as their lives were before our original tale. And without spoiling too much, we get to see how they are shaped, from being born to a couple who definitely should never have been parents, to finding their door and in entering it, making commitments and decisions they had no chance of understanding, and then the consequences that must inevitably follow.

One of the things I love about Seanan McGuire's writing is her ability to take the monsters of legends, fairytales, and myths and make them real without making them less terrifying or watering them down. Our monsters are sometimes those closest to us, perhaps even those we've chosen to be near to. They are incorporated into the fabric of our everyday, but not any less fearsome for their familiarity.

This is a tale of coming of age and identity, of the things you can control and those you can't, of expectations and reality, and a true test of whether blood runs thicker than water.