In an Absent Dream – Seanan McGuire

The premise of the Wayward Children series is that some children do pass through a magical wardrobe, or through a looking glass, or through a Gate, and find themselves in a world where the rules are different. Sometimes they return home, and that can be awkward. Generally, if they’ve been a year in another world, a year has passed at home, and they are treated as delusional runaways. (We aren’t told whether people are naturally drawn to worlds that suit them, or whether there just isn’t much point in telling stories of children who go through the wrong portal and promptly get themselves killed.)

The worlds on the other side are oddly narrow. For story purposes, they may consist of a single valley or a single garden or a single lake, or a small stretch of countryside. (Perhaps the worlds are the same size as ours and we just aren’t shown more, but there is little sense of a much larger world over the next hill.)

Lundy’s portal - a door that appears where no door should be - takes her to the Goblin Market. (I’m not sure why that name was picked. The markets of that name that I’ve encountered in other works have little in common with this one.) The Goblin Market has a small number of strictly-enforced rules, of which the one that receives the most attention in this book is “always give fair value”. The Market requires a specific form of justice, and enforces it.

The fifth rule is “remember the curfew”: A child is given multiple opportunities to visit the Goblin Market, but only until the age of eighteen, when the choices are to join the Market permanently or be locked out.

There’s a rule #0 - not one of the numbered rules, but the first rule Lundy encounters: “Be Sure”. Lundy is not sure. She is drawn to the Market, but she is also drawn to her family.

I did not enjoy this book as well as the earlier books in this series. It is written with exquisite skill, but the story had too much head and too little heart. We understand Lundy more than we care about her.

SPOILER:

I didn’t realize until the end that the Lundy of this novel was the Lundy from “Every Heart a Doorway”. Realizing that would have given away the ending. I thought the ending unfair. At the end, Lundy asks for something that is inconsistent with fair value. The opinion of the Goblin Market appears to have been that she was old enough to have better internalized the Market’s rules - and that she was too old to merit an explicit warning. (Lundy is also in a gray area at this point regarding rule one: “ask for nothing”.)