I ended up listening to this audiobook during a road trip, having chosen it almost wholly on vibes, but I’m pleased to say that I really enjoyed it! In my review of The Darkness Outside Us I mentioned that I like books with premises that make me wonder how the hell the author managed to come up with such an idea, and this is definitely one of those.
The core premise of the book is more or less a boarding school for wayward children who slipped away from their parents and found doorways that led them to other worlds. Our protagonist is Nancy, who went through a doorway that took her to the land of the dead; having recently returned to the human world, she’s struggling to adapt to human life and no longer feels connected to a human identity. Her parents have sent her to a boarding school run by a woman who herself was once such a wayward child and therefore knows best how to handle them, although she doesn’t present herself as such to the children’s concerned parents.
Soon after Nancy’s arrival at the school, other students begin to be murdered in various gruesome ways, and it’s up to Nancy and her ragtag band of friends to figure out what’s happening and why.
This is a novella more than a novel, at only 173 pages, but I felt that the amount of content in those 173 pages was perfect. The plot moved along quickly but still left room to grow close to the characters and to understand their motivations. Each of the kids at the boarding school has quirks that come from the worlds they resided in, which are understood using an axis system–one axis runs from Virtue to Wicked and the other runs from Logic to Nonsense, and a world’s placement on that chart tends to predict how kids who lived there will behave. I thought that was a really clever way of explaining the variety of different worlds that could be found through these doors, and it was neat to see those traits come through the characters–for example, Nancy’s roommate Sumi lived in a high Nonsense, high Virtue world, whereas twins Jack and Jill lived in a high Logic, high Wicked world.
Another thing I enjoyed about this book was how it ended. I won’t spoil it, but to me the ending felt open enough that the story could continue, yet not so open that it was obviously a cliffhanger to lead into another installment. (I do know that the Wayward Children series is like 11 books long now, though!) I don’t necessarily feel a compulsion to return to this book’s universe myself but I can see how another reader might.
Overall I found this a well-crafted novella with a great audiobook narrator!