Across the Green Grass Fields (Seanan McGuire)

Across the Green Grass Fields
The Wayward Children series, Book 6
Seanan McGuire
Tor
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In her youngest years, Regan had two best friends, Laurel and Heather... until the day Heather brought a garter snake to school and Laurel decided she wasn't "girl" enough to play with, dragging Regan away. She never forgot that moment, the lesson taught in coldness and cruelty: there's a right way and a wrong way to be a girl, and to be the wrong way is to be cast out. Though she never became obsessed with boys or dating, she did fall in love with horses, which was acceptably feminine enough to get a pass from the one-girl judge, jury, and executioner Laurel... but, as years pass, her friends start to change and she does not. Eventually, Regan has to ask why.
That's when her parents tell her the truth: a lot of words about chromosomal abnormalities and androgen insensitivity, about being intersex, about how she will likely never be entirely a "she" (by traditional, Laurel-dictated standards) without hormone treatment. The next day at school, she makes the mistake of telling Laurel... and is driven away, pushed out like a monstrous freak.
Running away from school, Regan finds herself before a door in the woods... a door that leads to a land of unicorns and centaurs and all manner of hoofed wonders and terrors, where humans are near-legendary creatures. It is said in the Hooflands that humans only arrive when there is a great danger or a great change, and once they've done what they were sent to do, they disappear. Horse-lover Regan soon finds herself more at home among these gentle giants than she ever was on Earth; if she avoids the Queen, perhaps she can stay here forever among the centaurs. But, hard as she tries to avoid her apparent destiny, destiny has a way of coming to find her...

REVIEW: After a few iffy reads in a row, I needed a break, and any title by Seanan McGuire is far more likely than not to be good. Across the Green Grass Fields introduces a new character to her Wayward Children series of portal fantasy adventurers, the intersex girl Regan, and a new world in the Hooflands, a dream world for any horse-lover - even if the domestic unicorns are dumber than a pile of rocks and smell bad to boot. Like the other children in the series, Regan struggles to fit into a box the world forces her into, a struggle that leads to failure that leads to a door and another world. Here, she finds a place where she feels more at home (to the point where she becomes wary of passing through any door, lest it dump her back in the cold and cruel Earth run by Laurels who tell her she's a freak) - but, ultimately, she is an outsider, an anomaly, and as much as she becomes bonded with the centaur herd that takes her in, she'll always be a visitor, always have the weight of Destiny hanging over her head. But is Destiny an outside force, or merely the inevitable result of one's own conscience and choices? It reads fast, with moments of beauty and heartbreak, and if it seems slightly thinner or weaker than the other Wayward Children installments, it's still leagues ahead of many titles.

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