Award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Seanan McGuire returns to her acclaimed and beloved series, Wayward Children, with the ninth installment, MISLAID IN PARTS HALF-KNOWN.

When readers last connected with McGuire’s world-traveling children and Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children in LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND, we met Antoinette (nicknamed “Antsy”), whose childhood trauma cast her into a world of Doors and markets, where she made her home in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go. For years, Antsy helped the store’s owner and manager collect goods and food delicacies from other worlds, never cognizant of the cost of each step through a portal.

At the end of the book, Antsy realized that her time in the Shop Where the Lost Things Go had cost her not just days but years, leaving her a nine-year-old girl in a 16-year-old’s body, and setting her on a path for healing, justice and awareness. But first she made the store’s minders, Vineta and Hudson, promise to educate future children on the risks and let them make their own choices about opening Doors. With her loose ends tied up, Antsy headed directly to Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children.

"I can think of no other way to beat the winter blues than by journeying to Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children and reconnecting with Seanan McGuire’s marvelous creations."

In MISLAID IN PARTS HALF-KNOWN, Antsy arrives at the school and explains her journey to Eleanor, the headmistress, whose job it is to classify the worlds her students have visited and place them with roommates who have had similar experiences. But Eleanor has been slipping lately. Her ranking of worlds --- Nonsense or Logic, Virtue or Wickedness --- has been skewing toward Nonsense, even when the stories her students tell her indicate that their worlds were anything but that. Immediately casting Antsy as a Nonsense girl, Eleanor rooms her with fan-favorite Sumi, a match that isn’t quite made in heaven. This helps Antsy get acquainted with her classmates, including Cora, Kade and Christopher, who have appeared in previous installments.

As the girls get to know one another and Antsy becomes familiar with the school, her classmates discover something very interesting about her: the Shop Where the Lost Things Go was a Nexus acting as a sort of lobby or elevator back to every other world imaginable. If Antsy can get back to her world, they reason, she can probably help them find their ways back to their worlds as well. Antsy, who is conscious of the debt her friends would be accruing, warns them that the Doors are finicky and must be respected. But when a school bully learns what the group is investigating, Antsy’s hands are tied. She, Sumi, Cora, Kade, Christopher and a new friend, Emily, take the leap, delivering solid nods to the message across the Door: Be sure.

As the children journey to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, they deliberate and debate just how sure they are, whether or not they blame the adults who pushed them into their Doors, the cruelness of the worlds that the Doors lead to, and if any of them really want to go back to their worlds or if they’ve found contentment and purpose at Eleanor’s school. These discussions are some of the richest the series has ever produced. The children’s unique understanding of their predicaments --- not to mention what they’ve gained and lost --- are illuminating, deeply poignant and insightful.

Adding chaos to their painful discussions is the immediately obvious fact that the Shop Where the Lost Things Go is not only continuing to take advantage of a lost child, but that one of its minders, Hudson, has gone missing, cast into a random world by an angry Vineta. Now the children’s journey is twofold: find Hudson, setting the Shop Where the Lost Things Go right; and, maybe, find the children’s Doors and send some of them back to the worlds where they felt most alive.

I can think of no other way to beat the winter blues than by journeying to Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children and reconnecting with Seanan McGuire’s marvelous creations. In the last book, she gave readers the first breakdown of how the Doors function. This time, she expounds on that technical knowledge, explaining not just how or why the Doors appear, but why they kick children out, leaving them lonely, misunderstood, and more or less forced to attend Eleanor’s school or risk being labeled “crazy” by their families.

In doing so, McGuire also digs into the history of Eleanor West herself, while highlighting the continuing journeys of Sumi and other fan favorites. But perhaps the most rewarding part of the book is Antsy, whose quest for justice not only rights a wrong, but also helps her classmates reckon with the hands they were dealt (or rudely cast away from) and consider that time-honored adage: Be sure.

On a more critical level, MISLAID IN PARTS HALF-KNOWN feels a bit like a placeholder at times as the narrative arc chronicles the journeys of many existing characters. While it is always a pleasure to revisit these familiar people, the widened focus causes the pacing to suffer a bit. All this means, of course, is that I’m even more excited for the 10th entry. Those who loved LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND will enjoy catching up with Antsy, and I can’t wait to see who McGuire introduces next.