In An Absent Dream (Wayward Children – 4) by Seanan McGuire
This fourth entry and prequel tells the story of Lundy, a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should.
When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she’s found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.
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About the Author
Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.
Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the anti-venom” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?,” and can be amused for hours by almost anything. “Almost anything” includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.
Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.
In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music (see the Albums page for details). She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These…”, as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.
Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.
Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.” It probably doesn’t help that she has so many hobbies.
Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.
My Review
5 stars
When Katherine Lundy is six she realizes that she is different from other kids and that her life has essentially been chosen for her. But she doesn’t want that path, she wants something different. This leads her to a door to the Goblin Market. The market has wondrous creatures and things but a strict set of rules with one of the most important being Fair Value.
Lundy goes on various adventures in the Goblin Market throughout until she is eighteen years old. Then she has to decide if she is going back to her world or if she is going to live in the Goblin Market. But she is not alone in her adventures, her father had a similar experience when he was younger and he doesn’t want to lose Lundy to the market.
I love Seanan McGuire’s work and jumped at the chance to review this book. It was a bonus that it was an audiobook that was wonderfully narrated by Cynthia Hopkins. I admit that I have not read the first books in this series so I didn’t really understand what was going on at first. But I easily caught on and quickly got sucked into Lundy and her life.
This is an incredibly touching story. I felt for poor Lundy being the odd person out and finding herself in the Goblin Market. And having the ability to go back several times before she turned 18 made it harder to return to her family and hard to lose the family she has at the Goblin Market.
This is a wonderful story and one I recommend checking out. I really enjoyed it and want to find out what I have missed from the first three books in the series.
I received a complimentary copy of this book. I voluntarily chose to read and post an honest review.
I would like to thank Macmillan Audio for the opportunity to listen to and share this book.
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