Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire [Book #6]

Content Tags: Fantasy, LGBTQIA+, Transphobia

Description from Storygraph:

A young girl discovers a portal to a land filled with centaurs and unicorns in Seanan McGuire's Across the Green Grass Fields, a standalone tale in the Hugo and Nebula Award-wining Wayward Children series.

"Welcome to the Hooflands. We're happy to have you, even if you being here means something's coming."

Regan loves, and is loved, though her school-friend situation has become complicated, of late.

When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to Be Sure before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines--a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes.

But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of heroism are equal, and not all quests are as they seem...

A standalone Wayward Children story containing all-new characters, and a great jumping-on point for new readers.

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Apparently, I should have read the description prior to just now... because I spent a good amount of this book trying to remember which character from Every Heart a Doorway was Regan. I'm excessively terrible at keeping track of characters - particularly their names - so I was trying to recall which character she might be. I even scanned through Every Heart a Doorway to double check the names of which characters I couldn't recall from memory, to no avail. Finally, I googled it and found a tweet from Seanan McGuire about how this is the first book that introduced a character in their door story rather than in Eleanor's Home for Wayward Children. 🤦

In any case, this is another installment in the Wayward Children stories and this one features a main character who is intersex. This novella is quite a bit different from the last one - Jack and Jill's world is quite a bit darker than the world that Regan was transported to. It was a quaint story of children learning and growing and discovering the world around them and of found family. I particularly enjoyed that Regan didn't find a door and a new family because her birth family was mean or mistreated her - the opposite is true. But you can find family even if your bio family is kind!

To continue my discussion of "how stand-alone are these books really?" - this one actually does stand-alone pretty well. There isn't reference to Eleanor's Home for Wayward Children and this one doorway is explained, so there isn't much included for the entire world/concept. But that works in favor of it being stand-alone because you could read just this one and still get a complete story or you could read others in the series as well to find out more and maybe there will be more information about Regan's journey later!

Book Reflection Wrap-up:

How did it impact you? Do you think you'll remember it in a few months or years?

Out of all the Wayward Children novellas thus far, I think this one will stick with me the least. That's not to say it's bad, it just has had the least amount of drama of any of them which makes it likely for my brain to forget about what happened. lol

What was your favorite line from the book?

"I can be beautiful and limited at the same time," she said. "[...] There's nothing wrong with being limited, as long as you have people around to make sure those limitations don't get you hurt."