Come Tumbling Down / Wayward Children 5 // Book Review

Thank you to Tor and Netgalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not change my opinion in anyway.

 Book: Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children 5) by Seanan McGuire
Release Date: January 7th 2020
Tags: Fantasy / Portal Fantasy / Young Adult / Resurrection / Trans Man / Fat Character / OCD / LGBTQ+ / Lesbian / F/F Relationship
Other books in this series I reviewed
Every Heart A Doorway / Down Among the Sticks and Bones / Beneath the Sugar Sky / In an Absent Dream

 

When Jack left Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children she was carrying the body of her deliciously deranged sister–whom she had recently murdered in a fit of righteous justice–back to their home on the Moors.
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But death in their adopted world isn’t always as permanent as it is here, and when Jack is herself carried back into the school, it becomes clear that something has happened to her. Something terrible. Something of which only the maddest of scientists could conceive. Something only her friends are equipped to help her overcome.
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Eleanor West’s “No Quests” rule is about to be broken.
Again.

Come Tumbling Down is already the fifth installment to the Wayward Children novella series and I hope it never ends. It is such a delicious little series to set your teeth into and I enjoy the set up.

Books 1, 3 and this number 5 deal with the present that is going on at the school with our group of wayward children that we follow. Books 2 and 4 dealt with three characters past where they found their door for the first time and entered the realm they have lost in the present. I think that back and forth is interesting because you learn things about characters that you didn’t through the normal story telling.

Come Tumbling Down returns Jack back to the school to ask for help from her friends. At the end of Every Heart a Doorway she killed Jill and took her back to their door to the Moors where she resurrected her. Her sister paid her that back and to save the Moors Jack now needs some help.

Of course they answer. They are heroes. I found it an interesting dynamic where some relationships needed to be retouched on and others where there was no previous relationship, and we kind of sailed through that. The amount of characters was great but I also felt it was the weak point of the novel. These novella’s just aren’t very big and if you are going to switch the point of view between all the characters here and there it can start to feel very messy as it did for me at some point. It is why I can’t quite love this installment as I have done others.

Other than that though there was just so much to love. Kade who worries about his aunt. Christopher who wants to find his door so desperately. Jack who is so very in love but shaken to her core.

There is OCD rep in this book through Jack which I think was done pretty well. It is not just about needing everything clean but goes through her entire core. There is honestly quite a lot to unpack in this book though, about identity. About needing that one place that felt right. About not fitting right in your own body.