I’ve been happily reading and reviewing Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series since the beginning, but once the pandemic hit, my reading habits took a major hit. Authors and premises I once loved fell by the wayside. I lost track of the series, distracted by other stories and the general chaos of life.
Then, this past October I read “Skeleton Song,” a short story about Christopher’s time in Mariposa. It felt like finding something I hadn’t realized I’d lost. Suddenly there was this shiny thing in my hand, something old yet new, something whose shape I could only just remember but which also felt exciting and refreshing. I immediately knew I had to review the next book in the Wayward Children series, if only to see if this feeling would last. Reader, I’m so glad to be back.
Other than a few references to amuse fans of the series, Lost in the Moment and Found is another excellent standalone novella. It’s chock full of information about the Doors (or, as Elodina would say, doors): how they find children, what other worlds know about them, where they go when they aren’t in use, and what it costs to use them. But before we get to the answers to questions we’ve been asking since Every Heart a Doorway, I suppose we should start at Antsy’s beginning.
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Lost in the Moment and Found
Antoinette, or Antsy as everyone calls her, is our plucky child protagonist. She’s a squirmy, rowdy child but a thoroughly happy one. Her life is carefree and simple, with parents who adore her and a home where she is safe and provided for. After her father’s death, that version of Antsy is lost. A new man comes into her mother’s life, and Antsy begins losing more parts of herself. The adults in her life cannot or will not see what she sees or listen to what she feels. The more things deteriorate, the more isolated Antsy becomes from everyone around her, until it becomes unbearable. One evening, seven-year-old Antsy packs a bag and leaves the only world she’s known. She finds a shop with a Door with the words “Be sure” written on the frame. And she steps through.
Unlike other children in this series, Antsy doesn’t enter a new portal world but the space between where all doors meet. She tumbles into a sort of trinkets shop where everything lost winds up. Lost socks, missing pets, old toys, all the things we forgot to miss until they’re gone. The shop is run by a fussy magpie called Hudson and an ancient woman called Vineta. They give her a purpose and a focus by setting her to work at the shop. Because of her age, she can open all the doors flitting around the shop, allowing her and Vineta to visit hundreds of worlds. Yet the shop holds a secret, hidden away by its caretakers but not forgotten. A secret so powerful that it could undo everything Antsy thinks she knows.
The threads of trauma and grief connect each of the stories in the Wayward Children series. Doors only open for children who need an escape or who have no reason to stay, and to get to that point a child must undergo experiences we hope no child should. Antsy is no different. (Heed the content warnings for “grooming and adult gaslighting,” but also know that the worst never happens, on the page or off.) The world she enters is designed to appeal to a child… and to frustrate a grown-up. The doors give children new lives at prices so high they cannot comprehend what they’ve paid it until it’s too late. There is no happily-ever-after, no playful Narnia or topsy-turvy Wonderland, only cold, hard reality wearing a sheepskin disguise. Antsy doesn’t deserve what happens to her in our world or the in-between world anymore than any other child deserves the terrible things life hurls at them. The question now is how to survive.
I think it’s easy to look at a book like this and feel like the whimsy from the junk shop portions overwhelms the seriousness of the real world portion, but I think that’s missing the forest for the trees. The grooming and gaslighting don’t stop when Antsy crosses the threshold, they just take on different shapes and have different end goals. Antsy isn’t saved by her door anymore than Kade or Lundy were saved by theirs. Sometimes the doors are wrong. Sometimes the worlds they deliver their children to aren’t right or better than the one they left. She is a child, but there’s nothing childlike about her experiences. Those of you who were lucky enough to be surrounded by adults who protected you and told you the truth, it might be hard to understand why McGuire’s story is structured the way it is and why Antsy reacts the way she does. However, from my perspective as someone who did not have a safety net that expansive or sturdy, Antsy’s story rings true.
If you’ve been on the fence about Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series or needed an excuse to return to it, consider Lost in the Moment and Found your signal to get to it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to catch up with Where the Drowned Girls Go and “In Mercy, Rain.”
Lost in the Moment and Found is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
Alex Brown is a Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, librarianship, and Black history. Find them on twitter (@QueenOfRats), instagram (@bookjockeyalex), and their blog (bookjockeyalex.com).
