146 pages
Published 2023
Read December 1
Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)
Way back in the day (which, thanks to the speed with which consensus reality has crumbled, here means 2022 or so), the fantasy fiction side of Twitter went into a tizzy over the cover of this installment of the Wayward Children series. A Doorway to dinosaurs! McGuire cautioned readers that dinosaurs really weren’t the focus of the story, but I’ve been excited about this entry ever since. Its cover is the entire reason I resumed reading through the series after a lapse of nearly seven years.
Mislaid continues the storylines of Lost in the Moment and Found (with Antsy now attending Eleanor West’s school, conscientiously if naively applying her talent for finding lost things) and Where the Drowned Girls Go (with Cora back at school with new friends, all of them escapees from the Whitethorn Institute). I tend to find the main School-based storyline less interesting than the more or less standalone books that establish each new character’s backstory. Lost in particular was a highpoint for the series; Mislaid feels even more like a step down in comparison.
It doesn’t help that Mislaid (and Antsy) is tasked with doling out a bunch of exposition about Doors, Worlds, and the ways they work. As a worldbuilding author myself, I’m not convinced any of this is strictly necessary. I found it interesting, but would’ve preferred a more emotionally charged storyline to the nuts and bolts of what is, essentially, how the Looking Glass operates.
And McGuire was right to caution her fans against thinking Mislaid is a dinosaur novel. I mean, it is enough of one for my purposes. But we don’t reach the dinosaur world until page 100, and we pop right out of it again just two chapters later. It’s a charming interlude, and well worth reading the series to get there. If only we’d gotten a full novel of it (instead of more banter between half a dozen main characters).
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