Come Tumbling Down (Seanan McGuire)

Come Tumbling Down
The Wayward Children series, Book 5
Seanan McGuire
Tor
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Horror
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: When Jack and Jill Wolcott last left Eleanor West's boarding school, back through a doorway to the haunted world of the Moors, one of them was dead. None of the students thought they'd return, for they'd gotten the very thing so many of them longed for: a chance to go back to the other world where they'd spent their childhoods, where they'd been heroes - where they'd actually belonged, unlike cold and unmagical Earth. Then the lightning door appears, and a stranger carries a limp and traumatized Jill through... only it isn't Jill inside. Jack was betrayed, ripped out of her body and placed in her sister's, as the vampire Master plots to overthrow his archenemy Dr. Bleak and claim victory over the Moors once and for all. Hanging onto her sanity by a slender, fraying thread, Jack must ask her former schoolmates for help before the world she loves and calls home is torn apart. But even though they all were once heroes in their own worlds, the horrors awaiting them in the Moors may be too much to bear, and even heroes can fail.

REVIEW: Another superb entry in McGuire's marvelous Wayward Children series, Come Tumbling Down revisits the twins-turned-enemies Jack and Jill and the Moors, a Gothic nightmare world of vampires and mad scientists and shadowy things with too many teeth, perpetually lit by a watchful crimson Moon. Like the previous volume (Beneath the Sugar Sky, which revisited Sumi's treat-based world of Confection), the core cast from Eleanor West's school once again rallies to help one of their own, each still hoping to rediscover their own doorways to their own happy endings... but Jack's story is a stark reminder that getting to go home doesn't guarantee a happily-ever-after, and fairness is never a concern of the doorway worlds. Nevertheless, heroism seems to be a habit that's hard to break, and sometimes that means walking into the jaws of Hell - or a vampire's lair, or the temple of the Drowned Gods - even knowing it's unlikely one will ever walk out again alive, let alone as the same person who walked in. Once again, McGuire crafts a story that approaches poetry, full of tragedy and moments of humor and beauty (if a dark beauty), with a satisfactory conclusion that nevertheless leaves fresh scars and bruises on the characters.

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