Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke their crown.
And Jill came tumbling after.

This should have been the first book in the series. What a fantastic character sketch written by Seanan McGuire. I really enjoyed this book and now I am excited for the remaining books in the series.

This book discusses gender issues, raising children, etc., and gets much deeper into various relationships.

This, you see, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else's child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They do not even see the love, not really. It can be easy, when looking at children from the outside, to believe that they are things, dolls designed and programmed by their parents to behave in one manner, following one set of rules. It can be easy, when standing on the lofty shores of adulthood, not to remember that every adult was once a child, with ideas and ambitions of their own.