Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire returns to her popular Wayward Children series with Down Among the Sticks and Bones—a truly standalone story suitable for adult and young adult readers of urban fantasy, and the follow-up to the Alex Award-winning, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus finalist, Tiptree Honor List Every Heart a Doorway Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. This is the story of what happened first... Jacqueline was her mother’s perfect daughter—polite and quiet, always dressed as a princess. If her mother was sometimes a little strict, it’s because crafting the perfect daughter takes discipline. Jillian was her father’s perfect daughter—adventurous, thrill-seeking, and a bit of a tom-boy. He really would have preferred a son, but you work with what you've got. They were five when they learned that grown-ups can’t be trusted. They were twelve when they walked down the impossible staircase and discovered that the pretense of love can never be enough to prepare you a life filled with magic in a land filled with mad scientists and death and choices.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

High Fidelity

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.

Katheryn

Madison Jones 

Beck Krystal

It was all nonsense. As if anyone could be offered an eternity of privilege and power and refuse it on a whim.

The trouble with denying children the freedom to be themselves—with forcing them into an idea of what they should be, not allowing them to choose their own paths—is that all too often, the one drawing the design knows nothing of the desires of their model.

Real places didn’t go away just because you’d had a nap.

SOME ADVENTURES BEGIN EASILY. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.

Identical twins were unsettling to much of the population: dressing them in matching outfits and treating them as one interchangeable being might seem appealing while they were young enough, but as they aged, they would start to unnerve people. Girls, especially, were subject to being viewed as alien or wrong when they seemed too alike. Blame science fiction, blame John Wyndham and Stephen King and Ira Levin. The fact remained that they needed to distinguish their daughters.

I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes. —JACK WOLCOTT

Down Among the Sticks and Bones quotes

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