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📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: In An Absent Dream
AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Published: January 8th 2019
@seananmcguire
Review
Even a fantasy has rules. Rules you cannot break. Rules you must remember, and understand. And Katherine Lundy has a lot of learning to do.
Book one of the Wayward Children series introduced us to one of the teachers at the school, a bookish little girl named Lundy who aged in reverse. Gee, sounds like there’s a story there. Well, here you go. Lundy’s door led her to the Goblin Market, a place where the rules of subjective equivalent exchange were so much law that they enforce themselves. If you don’t give pay properly for what you take, you turn into a bird, bit by bit. And, as everything is run by barter, you have to give something of equal value to the recipient to get something of equal value from them. It’s the only place you can get a year’s worth of meat and fruit pies in exchange for three pencils and a sharpener.
Of course, Lundy is back in the real world when we first saw her, and stuck as a child, so something OBVIOUSLY went wrong. This is a sad story. Unlike the tales before, where the children had already lost the way back to their doors and were now looking for where they belonged, this is the story of how she lost her door. For once in this series, I don’t look at Lundy’s parents with disgust. Her parents love her as she is and want her to stay with them. The problem is, they are selfish and manipulative in that desire, and it only drives her away. It also only makes her death in the first book all the more sad. She has only known loss.
This book is easy reading and, like the others, quite fast. I finished in an afternoon, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
You can see more in my video review:
Summary
This fourth entry and prequel tells the story of Lundy, a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should.
When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she’s found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.
I voluntarily read this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.