Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear
The Wayward Children series, Book 10
Seanan McGuire
Tor
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Born to a mother who fled the hospital without even giving her a name, Nadya was raised by Mother Russia in an orphanage along with other unwanted children. She may have had only one full arm at birth, but never missed what she never had, never saw herself as lesser or weaker, not even when the foreign couple arrived and whisked her off to the faraway land of Colorado - that is, until her new "parents" fit her with a prosthetic arm. It's clumsy, it's painful, it's heavy, and it's not something she needed or even asked for... but, then, what she wants or needs doesn't seem to matter, not to people who seem more in love with a concept of a daughter than the real girl they carried halfway around the world from her home. One of her few solaces is the turtle pond near her home. The turtles never judge her, never tell her she's incomplete or wrong.
It's because of the turtles that she falls through the door beneath the pond.
One moment, she's plunging beneath the murky waters. The next, she finds herself by the banks of a great river - facing a massive, malevolent frog that devours her false arm in one snap and nearly does the same to her before she flees. A kindly talking fox leads her to another river, where she meets the people of Belyyreka - a people who keep great speaking turtles as companions and have a city beneath the waters of the vast River Wild. As a Drowned Girl, she has been welcomed into their society, and soon feels more at home here than ever she did in America or even Russia. But she is still young, still wild and unsettled and prone to push and prod at boundaries, and still a child from beyond a door - and, amid the dangerous currents and lurking monsters and strange rivers, the world she left behind may still someday come calling for her again.
REVIEW: I've been enjoying the "origin" tales in this series a bit more than the main arc books, and this is another interesting, sometimes emotional backstory of a student from Eleanor West's boarding school for former portal adventurers, the girl Nadya. Rejected at birth by a young woman who never wanted to be a mother, let alone a mother to a one-armed child, she refuses to be bent or broken or made to feel less by anyone, for all that she still feels the lack of love and family keenly. At first, she has hopes that the American couple who adopt her might become a family, and she forms a slight bond with her father, but soon realizes the truth behind her adoption, the role she was acquired to fill - both a loving, perfect daughter and a grateful foreign orphan to parade before their church peers. Since she happened to not have a full complement of arms, well, her "loving" parents will fix that, too, and surely she'll be overflowing with gratitude and devotion for them then! Themes of ableism underlie the tale (not to mention themes of cultural prejudices), as Nadya becomes the companion of a Belyyreka turtle with a cracked shell who has also been told just what they can and cannot do because of their "disability". The world of the rivers is intriguing, a place of different layers and densities of water, some of which can be breathed as air (the whole world itself is beneath the waters of a vast lake), others of which will drown a person as easily as water on Earth; the turtles can swim through it all, so they essentially fly about the city, and carry boats and people up to the surface of the river as well as down below. I enjoyed it, though the end felt a bit abrupt and it lacked some of the heft and depth of a few earlier series entries, if that makes any sense.
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