Where the Drowned Girls Go
The Wayward Children series, Book 7
Seanan McGuire
Tordotcom
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Not many children find a doorway to another world, but Cora did, pulled into the aquatic realm of the Trenches to become the mermaid she always was at heart... until, like so many such children, she found herself back on Earth, where the water can't be breathed by human lungs, where too many just see her as a fat girl despite her now-turquoise hair. At Eleanor West's special boarding school, she found others like herself, and made friends.
She followed those friends on a quest to other worlds, ever the hero (as all wayward children were, once upon a time)... but, in the monstrous Gothic realm of the Moors, the dark waters held something far more terrifying than she ever encountered in her own world - and the Drowned Gods claimed her as their own.
When she got back to Eleanor's school, she tried to ignore the nightmares, tried to ignore the whispering voices that turned her beloved water into something terrifying, but it's only getting worse, and nothing the aging woman or Cora's school friends have done can help. Cora can think of only one way out: forget her tail, forget her world, forget everything and just be the normal girl she used to be before she found her first door.
The Whitethorn Institute is Eleanor West's mirror, a regimented place dedicated to expunging the strangeness and the memories from its students and turning them into ordinary, unremarkable people fit for ordinary, unremarkable lives on this ordinary, unremarkable Earth. Their methods are drastic, but it's the only hope Cora sees for being rid of the pull of the Drowned Gods. Only what she sees in Whitethorn stirs the latent hero in her, for a monster walks these halls.
REVIEW: The latest installment moves the main story arc forward, following up on Cora as she struggles to deal with her encounter in the Moors and bringing Regan (from the previous volume) into the cast as a Whitethorn student who cannot give up her memories of the Hooflands. Cora's decision to transfer schools is not a simple whim or even necessarily a mistake; she's drowning, quite literally, in trauma, and for all Eleanor's good intentions nothing at her school seems able to address that. This is a beast Cora must face on her own terms, and seeing how the other school deals with the often-traumatic experience of being spat back onto Earth after journeying to other worlds helps, if perhaps not in the way the headmaster intended. However much Cora loves her world of the Trenches, the horrors of the Drowned Gods are worth almost any sacrifice to be rid of... almost. At the institute, there is only ever one world worth knowing, and one vision of that world that is to be acknowledged as truth, even though every student there knows it to be a blatant and painful lie (a clear and pointed commentary on the damage wrought by "alternative facts" and a skewed curriculum that erases vast swathes of experiences). As with other Wayward Children titles, there's more than a touch of pure horror to the story and to the other worlds the students (and adults) have been to; some children want very much to forget everything about their travels, and for good reasons, for not every world is a welcome one. The tale moves fairly decently, introducing hints of a greater challenge and arc ahead for the cast, though part of me prefers the "origin" tales.
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