When we first met her and last left her, Antsy had tumbled out of the Shop Where Lost Things Go and stumbled into Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Now with Seanan McGuire’s Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, Antsy’s story comes full circle. When Seraphina, the girl so beautiful she can compel people to do things they don’t want to, plots to force Antsy to find the Door back to her own portal world, Antsy is rescued by Kade, Cora, Christopher, and Sumi. And then she rescues them in turn by opening a Door.
Soon the quintet are jumping from world to world, new ones and old ones, on a quest to find lost friends. Antsy discovers that Vinetta has not kept her word and continues to exploit helpless children, but stopping her may force Antsy to cross a line she’s not ready to yet. The children are haunted by their pasts and their Doors. To save themselves, the Store, and the School, big choices must be made.
It was announced in 2020 that there would be at least ten books in the Wayward Children series. Mislaid in Parts Half-Known brings us to nine, with the tenth likely coming out early 2025. While there could (and should) be more books, this novella feels like it’s leading to something big and possibly final. In fact, I’d argue that the story’s biggest flaw is that it feels too much like place setting, like it’s designed to move the characters into position for the last act, rather than telling its own story.
Characters spend all their time moving around between worlds, not an unusual circumstance in this series, particularly the odd numbered books (even numbered tend to be prequels focused on a single character or pair). However, they don’t stay anywhere long enough to impact or be impacted by the portal world. Kade has spent years needing to reckon with what happened to him in Prism, but when he finally returns, all that reckoning happens in a conversation he’s neither a part of nor is even aware takes place. Antsy crashes into her own reckoning by accident, and again, much of the emotional charge is passed onto other characters. Likewise with Eleanor, Cora, and Stephanie. Sumi remains as she always is, an intense, warrior-like young woman eager for her fate but willing to wait for it to catch up to her. Christopher doesn’t have much to do, in terms of the plot and character development. He hovers in the background, does a couple of things, then he moves into the background again. Frustratingly, Seraphina remains a cartoon villain. She’s little more than a sketch of a person.
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Mislaid in Parts Half-Known
Previous books have doled out facts about the portal worlds and how the Doors worked like they were rare treats, but this book is dense with information. McGuire tells us almost everything we didn’t know about the magic system. Some of it is recapping what we already knew, but much of it is brand new information or a new take on old, erroneous information. The joy of discovery for me as a reader isn’t just seeing the portal worlds but in trying to figure out how everything works. Here, McGuire reveals so much that it kind of sucked the fun out of the worldbuilding for me. The choice makes narrative sense in terms of the story—especially if we’re leading up to a big event in the series—but it wasn’t as much fun for me as a reader.
The novella doesn’t work as a standalone, like many others in the series do. Readers new to the Wayward Children series should dip into the back catalogue before reading this one. I think I would’ve liked Mislaid in Parts Half-Known more if it had been merged with Lost in the Moment and Found as a novel instead of broken into two novellas. It is much more a conclusion of Antsy’s journey than its own story.
All that said, what I did appreciate about Mislaid in Parts Half-Known was spending more time with characters I already liked. I’m glad we finally got to Prism and were able to visit Stephanie’s Jurassic Park world, although I wish we had spent more time in both. Stephanie’s world is pictured on the cover, but sadly neither of the dinosaurs depicted actually appear in the book. I admit that I still haven’t read book 7, Where the Drowned Girls Go, which meant I had no clue about anyone or anything connected to the Whitethorn Institute. Stephanie is a compelling enough character that I now want to go back and catch up with her.
With Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, McGuire offered satisfying resolutions to the arcs of several characters and left enough loose threads to keep the series going at least for a few more books. I am genuinely looking forward to the next installment. Although this is one of my least favorite of the Wayward Children series, overall I enjoyed reading it. The bar the series sets is so high that even the less compelling stories are still better than a lot of fantasy fiction.
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
