After going back and rereading my favorite Wayward Children book (In an Absent Dream), I decided to pick up the last two that I hadn’t read yet. I loved one, didn’t care for the other, and I think I pinpointed what works for me with these books and what doesn’t.
Lost in the Moment and Found is the story of Antsy (Antoinette), whose father has died and mother has remarried. Her mother’s new husband is Bad News, and Antsy runs away from home to escape him. She stumbles upon a door (telling her, as always, to “Be Sure”) and finds herself in the Shop Where Lost Things Go. This is among my favorite of the magical worlds that Seanan McGuire has created–I loved the idea of a shop filled with forgotten and lost items. I also loved the other bit of magic found in the shop–it contains Doors to other magical worlds, if only you can open them. Antsy, guided by the shopkeepers Vineta and Hudson, finds that she can, and spends her time exploring countless other worlds, while also helping to catalogue and care for the lost items in the Shop. Eventually, she discovers an ugly truth about the Shop and the Doors that’s been deliberately hidden from her.
Next I read the (current) final book in the series, Mislaid in Parts Half-Known. In this one, Antsy finds herself at The School for Wayward Children, and is introduced to several characters we’ve met in previous books (Cora, Sumi, Christopher, and Kade chief among them). As she settles in at the school, other students learn that she may have a special ability to find others’ Doors, and soon there’s an almost-stampede of desperate students beating down a (regular) door to find her and make her find their Doors so they can return to the magical worlds they left behind. Antsy flees the school, accompanied by a small group of other students, and tries to find her way to the Shop Where Lost Things Go.
I loved Lost in the Moment and Found. It was a compelling world, Antsy is a good character, and Vineta and Hudson strike just the right note of reassuring and unsettling. This one is definitely my second favorite entry into this series, after In an Absent Dream. As for Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, it was just okay. One of the rules of Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children is “No quests,” a rule which gets broken often enough that it’s a bit of an inside joke. But I think the series would be better served by following it. These books are just too short to make a quest story compelling. The characters spend so little time in any given set piece that you don’t have the chance to fully explore and settle in before they’ve moved on to somewhere or something else. The stories that take place at the school or focus more on a single character’s development work better.
The other thing that I struggled with in Mislaid in Parts Half-Known is the cringe dialogue. For some reason, when McGuire writes dialogue between the students, rather than between a student and an adult or a student and a magical being, the dialogue goes from being fine to being terrible. In Lost in the Moment and Found, the dialogue between Vineta, Antsy and Hudson all seems perfectly realistic (even though Hudson is a talking bird). In Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, the students talk to each other in these grand statements that maybe would be profound, if they weren’t happening on every page. It’s tiresome, and Sumi, who is the worst offender at this, plays an important role in this book.
I’ll keep reading this series, because there are definitely some gems here. But Mislaid in Parts Half-Known is not one of them.
Rating for Lost in the Moment and Found: 4.5 stars
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known: 2.5 stars