2018 read #18: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
188 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 1 to October 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway was one of my favorite recent fantasy reads, a too-brief book that stuck with me far longer than have many weightier tomes. It was set in a boarding school for girls (it is almost always girls) who had gone through magical doorways into fantasy worlds, then couldn't adjust back to mundane reality after their return. In my review I wrote, "The characters here were a delight—I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories." And lucky for us, McGuire went on to begin a series of prequels detailing the backstories and adventures of some of those very characters that I so loved.

I don't know why it's taken me well over a year to get around to reading Sticks and Bones, the first of these prequels. The character Jack had been one of my especial favorites in Doorway, and here was a tale of Jack and her sister Jill and the Gothic horror world they had grown to love and call their true home. Sometimes you pick up a book and the time isn't right for it. Sometimes you only read twenty-five books in two years because a con artist leveraged the fascistic underbelly of your country's political landscape to become an illegitimate president and it's all you can do sometimes to get out of bed in the morning anymore. Be that as it may, I've finally read Sticks and Bones, and it is delightful.

Well, mostly. The characterizations here (especially of  Jill and Jack's parents) seem more suited to a fairy tale than a modern fantasy novel, little more than plot devices given names and mannerisms, but in a book like this, I suppose that's okay. I felt more let down by the denouement of a certain romantic subplot. I suppose it's something of a spoiler to confirm that the romantic subplot ends exactly the way one might expect in a Gothic tragedy, but the expectations of that trope are rooted in "fridging the female love interest to further the main character's plot," and in this particular instance also repeat the all-too-common (and problematic) practice of never letting the gay couple survive happily to the end of the book. It's hard to update the conventions of an old genre without unpacking some of that baggage, and Sticks and Bones might be just a tad too slender to address it as fully as it deserved.