Short Book Reviews: The Wrong School

Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)

Every Heart a Doorway introduced a delighted readership to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a school for children who fall through doors to imaginary worlds and then fall back out again. Such children often cannot adapt to the normal world again, they are so changed—for good or ill—by their time in other worlds. Many are tormented by nightmares or dreams of longing. The Home for Wayward Children offers them a place of understanding where they can slowly reconcile with what has happened to them and what they have lost.

But it cannot help all of them.

Cora is one such child. She’s spent too much time as a mermaid, a hero, to be able to accept a world in which her physical body makes her a target for unending teasing. When she hears about The Whitethorn School, she jumps at the chance to transfer. From the moment she enters the new premises, she realizes how different this new school is. The barred windows. The terrified, pathologically obedient students. The autocratic matrons. The Stepford teachers. The sinister headmaster. She finds herself a prisoner, subjected to daily brainwashing, with no hope of escape.

Until one of her friends from the Home for Wayward Children comes to rescue her and becomes the Whitethorn’s latest victim.

Like its predecessors, Where the Drowned Girls Go is filled with glorious inventions, friendships, compassion, and page-turning action.

Short Book Reviews: The Plight of the Oceans Meets The Little Mermaid

The Oyster Thief, by Sonia Faruqi (Pegasus)

This new take on the classic mermaid love story (which classic? Pick any one, they’re all represented) strive hard to be fresh and charming. For the better part it succeeds, except for a couple of areas. The story pits ocean exploitation against a complex society of vegetarian merpeople who live on various forms of seaweed and have creatures like whale sharks and seahorses as “muses,” personal companions. The naming conventions are often whimsical, especially if you are reading with a dictionary in hand (or, like me, have a dictionary on your e-reader). Parallel plotlines – an apprentice apothecary engaged to the scion of one of the richest merpeople families and the adopted heir to Ocean Dominion, an inventor who’s devised a way for fire to burn underwater – weave together with mystery elements, betrayals and reversals and an ultimately satisfying ending.

The book is not without its shortcomings, however. It’s overlong for the weight of the plot, and many elements of personality, history, and world-building are repeated too many times. But more than that, the author displays a lack of trust in the reader’s perspicacity. Too many elements are first shown as the action unfolds, then told in a ham-handed way that left me feeling as if I were being bashed over the head. As an example, Izar is desperately insecure and eager to win his adoptive father’s approval. I got that from their first interaction. I didn’t need to read:

He would do anything, invent anything, even another moon, to win Anrares’s approval. 

“From the company’s very first days, I dreamt of one day plundering the oceans for precious metals and minerals.”

 [A. Who talks like that? B. Metals are the refined product of minerals, rarely occurring in pure form in a salt-water environment. The book is rife with violations of the principles of physics, chemistry, and biology.]

At the same time, to be fair, the prose occasionally rises above the pedestrian examples above:

Tears trickled from her eyes, water meeting water, salt meeting salt. [Let’s not consider how an aquatic species can weep or how anything can trickle when immersed in water.] or: 

He pursued clues, she pursued cures. He kept merpeople safe, she kept merpeople well. 

People died in the deep sea not of the darkness outside, but the darkness within.

Still, the book merits four stars for its inventiveness and charm. Sonia Faruqi is an author worth watching. I hope that future works from this author will benefit from critical editorial input.