Nataliya's Reviews > In an Absent Dream

“You forgot that sometimes, fair value comes from change, and death, and sacrifice. You can’t have everything and give fair value.”

Sometimes you can’t help but feel that you don’t belong in the world you were born into. Too much may be expected of you, or too little, or everything is just a bit of wrong and you don’t even realize it until you get a glimpse of the world where those subtle wrongs are replaced with undeniable sense of rightness. So what do you do? You’d like to think you’d abandon the wrong mundane and bravely step into the brave new world that is yours? Leave the old wrong world behind like a set of discarded clothes and never look back? But can you really be sure? Really really sure?

Or would you, a serious and thoughtful and logical person, stop and think really hard - about what it means to be sure, about the weight of your choice, about the painful need to extend your choices, have it both ways, find a loophole?

“The Market does love me. It loves us all. It just ... loves the rules more. It doesn’t let any of us break them. It punishes us when it has to, because the rules have to be for everyone if they’re going to be for anyone.”

If you read the lovely Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, you already know what happens to a serious and thoughtful girl Lundy who one day went through a strange door and ended up at the Goblin Market , where “everything was lovely, and everything was terrible.” It was a place or rules and consequences and penalties, and above it all, strict uncompromising fairness. You know how her story - and even her life - ends. You know that she tried to cheat, to have it all, to not - in the words of the Market itself - give a fair value. We know she suffered a cruel punishment and lost her world. We know there is no happy ending.

This is the story of what happened.

“Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done.”

I liked the first and only book of ‘Wayward Children’ series that I read - McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway. It was sweet and lovely, and I never felt the need to look deeper into this world, until this year I decided to read all the Hugo awards nominees - and lo and behold, this sequel/prequel In an Absent Dream was promptly featured. I figured I’ll fly through it, short as it is, and move on.

I did not expect to like it so much — better than the first one, certainly. I did not expect to actually care about the story whose conclusion I already knew and did not care that much about. And yet care I did.

“There is wanting and there is needing, and when you want, you can make good choices, but when you need, it’s important the people around you not be looking to take advantage. When there are no clear prices, only the nebulous idea of ‘fair value,’ people get hurt. People get cheated.”

This is a stronger book than its predecessor — and that’s not because I’m at all enamored with the series. It’s less syrupy and sweet — instead, banking on us already know the inevitable unhappy ending, it basks in bittersweetness and unexpected sharp edges and teeth (or maybe beaks and claws?) and provides a bit of a mean bite. A book asking its heroine to be *sure*, it does seem to have a much more sure footing than its predecessor does — perhaps a benefit of an author that over the years became much more sure herself?

“This, then, was Katherine Victoria Lundy: pretty and patient and practical. Not lonely, because she had never really considered any way of being other than alone. Not gregarious, nor sullen, but somewhere in the middle, happy to speak when spoken to, happy also to carry on in silence, keeping her thoughts tucked quietly away. She was ordinary. She was remarkable.”

We — or at least I do — like protagonists who are similar to what Katherine Lundy is — serious, thoughtful, deliberate, bookish and reasonable; the ones that stop to think of the consequences and weigh their decisions and make smart educated choices. Perhaps it’s because that’s what many of us, bookworms, lean towards and are. These are the children than can get overlooked in favor of those who conform easier and provide easier delight and seem to be the world’s darlings. I wanted Lundy to succeed so badly while knowing that it was not in the cards for her. And despite knowing the outcome in advance, it still broke my heart.

There are things that you can’t take back. There are decisions that will always have consequences and you can’t wish them away. There’s not always a magical door waiting for you in the end to take you back to where you actually belong. And that’s terrible and cruel — and apparently a really good book.

4.5 stars.

I’d be painfully lost in the Goblin Market, by the way.

“The Goblin Market had seemed like a beautiful adventure on her first visit, a place where the rules made sense and the penalties were fair. Then it had become something terrible, a place where friends could die and not come back. Maybe the truth was somewhere in the middle of those two things, but now she understood how much there was to lose, and she was afraid.”

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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...