Where the Drowned Girls Go

231123 Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children Book 7) by Seanan McGuire


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We probably don't appreciate how hard it is to grow up until we are old.

Growing up involves dealing with new people, people who don't automatically put our interests first, people we have to compete with for attention and position. We have to learn new rules that may seem arbitrary, rules that are frequently not evenly enforced. Our competition exploit marginal advantages on their side – their prettiness or height – or make us suffer about marginal disadvantages – our plainness or weight. Because we have no sense of proportion, we absolutize everything.

Growing up is Hell.

Seanan McGuire's “Wayward Children” Series is about the trauma of growing up. In McGuire's telling, the traumas of growing up are transformed by the appearance of doors that take unhappy children – mostly girls – to fantastic worlds where they can be mermaid, heroes, vampires, princesses, or strange things, whatever it is that they think they need to get away from their trauma.

Why mostly girls? If you read McGuire's backstory for her characters, it seems that there are a lot of mean girl tormentors and innumerable ways that girls can be tormented by expectations imposed on them by family or society.

Cora Miller was a fat girl. She excelled at swimming. So, naturally, when she found a Door, it took her to a world where she could be a mermaid. She had adventures and became a hero. And then she was expelled by a door that turned her back into a fat girl with aquamarine hair.

The central conceit of McGuire's book is that the “wayward children” are often expelled from their fantasy worlds and then spend the rest of their lives looking for a way back, a way back that will probably never appear.

Some people can't adjust and they go to mourn and mope in a school for wayward children. Others want to forget and they go to the Whitethorn Academy where they can be taught to forget the world they have lived in.

Cora wants to forget. In a prior volume – which I haven't read – it appears that after she came back from the mermaid world – the “Trenches” – she went to a world of Drowned Gods. After returning from that horrible world, she is haunted by the Drowned Gods, who want her back.

She therefore decides to go to the Whitethorn Academy to find safety from the Drowned Gods' whisper in her head.

This book is about the Whitethorn Academy. It is not a happy place.

This book is about how Cora and her friend Sumi, who is a character from earlier books, plot to escape.

This book is about novella in length. It is an easy-reading novel for Young Adults, mostly girls, I suppose. I am neither but I enjoyed it, mostly for the descriptions of fantastic worlds. The characters are generally sympathetic, the prose is clean, and the plot moves along.