Come Tumbling Down

I loved this one! My favorite books in this series are the ones with Jack and Jill. I like the other characters, especially Kade, but Jack and Jill are definitely my faves.

I love this series. I'm still hanging in there, waiting for my Christopher book. I have faith it will happen eventually.

3.5
I feel weird about this installment in the series. I loved the first two books, was iffy on the third, and didn't like the fourth at all. This one was...weird. It reminded me a lot of Beneath the Sugar Sky in the quest/plot-heavy aspect. I didn't love it in that one and I didn't in this one either. I think in the quest stories the length of the novels work against them. I wanted more time and development with Jack and Jill, Jill especially. I'm not sure in what way, but the ending felt rushed and left something to be desired. That being said, I loved being back with these characters, Jack was a horrific delight, Jack and Alexis's relationship was so cute and gay and I'm in love with it. I thought Jack's OCD was really well done. Overall, I liked it, but Down Among the Sticks and Bones will always be my favorite.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children was an island of misfit toys, a place to put the unfinished stories and the broken wanderers who could butcher a deer and string a bow but no longer remembered what to do with indoor plumbing. It was also, more importantly, a holding pen for heroes. Whatever they might have become when they'd been cast out of their chosen homes, they'd been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.

Come Tumbling Down

Wayward Children

“This is terrible . . . I mean we knew it was going to be trouble . . . but this is bonus terrible. This is the awful sprinkles on the sundae of doom.”

“A little knowledge never hurt anybody,” said Sumi.

“Perhaps not. But a great deal of knowledge can do a great deal of harm, and I'm long past the point of having only a little knowledge.”

Sumi was Sumi. Spending time with her was like trying to form a close personal relationship with a cloud of butterflies. Pretty—dazzling, even—but not exactly companionable. And some of the butterflies had knives, and that was where the metaphor collapsed.

Jill had always been the more dangerous, less predictable Wolcott, for all that she was the one who dressed in pastel colors and lace and sometimes remembered that people like it when you smiled. Something about the way she'd wrapped her horror move heart in ribbons and bows had reminded him of a corpse that hadn't been properly embalmed like she was pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside. Terrifying and subtly wrong.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

I received a copy of this from Netgalley and the Publisher in exchange for my open and honest review.

Come Tumbling Down, Seanan Mcguire's fifth installment in the Wayward Children series follows the adventures of the delightfully macabre and grisly Wolcott twins. Jack, the mad scientist, sufferer of OCD, and generally quirky misanthrope and Jill, jacks twin, cruel, beautiful, and wants nothing more than to become a vampire. Jack returns to the school via a door made of lightning, literally carrying her love in her arms. Jack is trapped in the body of Jill, and although Jill is virtually identical to Jack physically, Jill has done horrible things that have soiled her very essence. Jack is a sufferer of OCD and desperately needs her body back to salvage her sanity. She requests the aid of former classmates in a quest, disobeying the no quest rule, to get something of great her body back from Jill and save Jill, even if it means saving her from herself.

The Moors, the twin's world they have come to love, is a place of darkness, monsters, mad science, and unforgiving fierce creatures. It is a place where gods are drowned, the moon has power, and lightning fuels the world, and it is a place where Jack feels most like herself and a home where she wants to stay. But first, Jack and friends Kade, Sumi, Cristopher, and Cora must help Jack stay sane and save this dark and macabre world. But, who knows who the monsters are? The line between good and evil or Monster and savior can be blurry. It depends entirely on which side you are standing.

“The world doesn't stop spinning because you're sad, and that's good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is. They'd make it out like it was a good thing, a few crying children in exchange for a peace that never falters or fades. We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we're supposed to do keep needing to be done.”
― Seanan McGuire, Come Tumbling Down

Again, McGuire delights and intrigues with the darkly rich world she has created in the Wayward Children series. Each installment has a message or a sort of idea that can be gleaned from the pages without it coming off as preachy. In this installment, McGuire touches on the sense of self and not being at home in one's own body. Where your body on the outside does not necessarily match who you are on the inside. It is an important message, and McGuire treats the subject delicately and with immense care.

McGuire has written another beautiful and meaningful story with Come Tumbling Down. It will delight, and maybe shock a bit. And, when you get done reading it, you might think twice about who is a monster, and who is not.

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