In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire [Book #4]

Content Tags: Fantasy, Death

Description from Storygraph:

This fourth entry and prequel tells the story of Lundy, a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should.

When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she's found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.

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In Every Heart a Doorway, Miss Lundy does not use anyone's first name, only honorific and surname. In an Absent Dream provides the backstory to that habit, which I really appreciated. In the "real" world, the only people I've encountered that refuse to use anything other than honorific plus surname are elitist assholes, so it felt a bit like a weird sticking point with Miss Lundy. It's even commented on as strange by one of the students in the only instance that she does use someone's first name in Every Heart a Doorway. Lundy's door was to the Goblin Market where rules are explicit and very important - rule number two being: "Names have power." At first she's confused what that rule could possibly mean, but later when she's being taught about the market and it's rules by The Archivist (not her real name) it makes more sense. The Archivist tells her that in the Market, she needs a name "that lacks the teeth of the name [she] wear[s] everyday. Something [she]'ll answer to that's harder to use against [her]." So, while in the mundane, human world that's not (typically) the case, to Miss Lundy the rule she learned in the Goblin Market remained with her - names have power.

This book was another excellent addition to the Wayward Children series. Miss Lundy was one of the more inscrutable characters in Every Heart a Doorway and this book added some great details that explained more of her demeanor and behaviors. The name thing was what stuck out to me the most, but there's much more to how she developed her general personality to some family dynamics stuff. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Now on to the stack of the next 4 books in the series that I borrowed from the library. 😁

Book Reflection Wrap-up:

How does the book's title work in relation to the book's contents?

This is the first book in the series where I don't quite understand the title's relation to the story. The "absent" bit might be because Lundy keeps disappearing (being absent) from her "real" life, maybe? I'm not really sure. If you read it and have a better idea what the title means, can you tell me?

Are there lingering questions from the book you're still thinking about?

This is somewhat specific to this series, but this isn't the only author who has done this. Why, especially in fiction, do authors use real-world, arbitrary ages for things? In this series it's that 18 is (in most cases) the cutoff for access to the doors and it's generally explained to be due to adult brains being more resistant to the magical. But the age 18 isn't really directly correlated to "adult brain function" (whatever that would be)... soooo why use 18 as a hard and fast rule in a fantasy book? Seems nonsensical to me.

Added to TBR: January 2019

Removed from TBR: May 2023