Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Really enjoying these books so far, they are well written, the characters are complex and I feel like the author did a good job in how the povs were split. The world is so interesting and I wanted to keep reading about, the only thing I wish was different was that it was longer as I could easily spend a good 300+ pages on this world. And the way the previous book and this one play off each other is very smart, making sense of the last one while priming you and exciting you for the next one.

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.

Another brilliant book in this series, I just love the way these books are written. Completely absorbing and binge worthy!

I listened to this one on audio too and it was read by the author which was brilliant as she really made you feel what she was trying to get across.

They're so good I've given in and bought the physical copies!

i enjoyed mcguire's writing, same as last time, but it wasn't as easy to enjoy the world with such a limited, miserable cast. the Moors are not a happy place, and Jack and Jill are not very happy children, with supremely unlikable parents.

there was a kind of gross fascination with watching things go downhill for the twins, which you know they will from the start - because that's why they were even in Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children's from the first book in the first place.

the world is so interesting, i can't help but wish that these books were more than novellas. i want to know more about the doorways, and the worlds behind them, and the characters in them!

i have to admit, i was confusing jack & jill for each other up until the point where they finally separate lol. i struggled with telling them apart in the first book as well. 

“Down Among the Sticks and Bones” is the second novella in a series written by Seanan McGuire. This novella is a prequel to “Every Heart a Doorway” which follows the twin sisters Jack and Jill, and how they ended up in Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. In this novella we see Jack and Jill finding their new world and home, and then it eventually shows the readers how they ended up being sent back to Earth.

I found Jack and Jill's story interesting and their world was quite dark. I thought that Jack's character was much better than Jill's as she was annoying. I really enjoyed the novella, so I gave the novella a 4/5 stars.

I loved this book so much! Jack was my favorite character of “Every Heart A Doorway,” so I was thrilled when I began this book and found her to be the main character. The world of the Moors, while being contained in such a small amount of pages, felt so fleshed out. Every character, even the very minor ones, felt multi-faceted and real. The story was so beautiful and is probably going to be my favorite of the series.

The second volume in the Wayward Children series focuses on two characters from the first book exclusively - Jack and Jill - and goes back to tell their story of the horror-themed world they stumbled into and how it changed them into the characters we meet in the first book. I enjoyed seeing how it all came about, since we only had snippets of the details in the first volume and especially appreciated Seanan McGuire's storytelling style, as a narrated tale it feels fairytale-like, but with a much darker edge. The middle seems to skip a lot and though I get these are meant to be shorter volumes, I think it could have benefited from a little more bulk. I'm not sure I really felt a connection to the characters overall, except for the fact that they felt shoe-horned into roles they didn't particularly feel they were meant for and found a place where they could ‘be themselves' through their magical door. Since the outcast and misunderstood theme is prevalent in the series as whole so far, it didn't give much more depth to the characters themselves and we're never really given much else to warm up to - although that might just be me personally, as Jack and Jill weren't my favourites from the first book and their world isn't one I personally felt a connection to.
However, I still plowed through the book and really like the concept that McGuire has come up with for this series. Although it plays on familiar ground (portal fantasy), it takes a unique and exceptional direction with it, which creates a world I want to continue to dive into again and again. Already on to book three, which says a lot considering I tend to be a reader that bounces around a lot and rarely sticks to a series all the way through in one go. Still highly recommended both as a standalone story and as a continuing part of the Wayward Children series.

Une réflexion super intéressante sur les rôles imposés aux enfants par leurs parents et la société.
J'ai bien aimé découvrir l'univers qui se cachait derrière la porte de Jack et Jill, un univers qui, au final, fonctionne très bien avec l'atmosphère d'octobre. Je me souviens avoir beaucoup aimé les jumelles dans le premier tome (surtout Jack) et de visiter leur histoire dans ce tome m'a fait très plaisir.

This was an absolute delight as the next installment for the Wayward Children. I loved getting more details about the twins, Jack and Jill. It really opened my eyes to their behavior in the first novel. I am certainly enjoying these quick novels on audiobook. I just hope my library will get the 5th book soon so I can listen to it as well.