★★★☆☆ Hostile negotiations

Into the Windwracked Wilds

A Deborah Baker (Seanan McGuire)

Let's start with the question, "Who is A. Deborah Baker?" Well, Baker is a pseudonym of Seanan McGuire, But that is not all she is. Baker is a character in McGuire's splendid novel Middlegame. She (Baker) is an alchemist who, in the late 19th and early 20th century, put in motion a plan to rule the world (as one does). This plan involved Baker becoming inconveniently dead (but perhaps only temporarily) and constructing embodiments of Alchemical doctrines. In order to propagate her plan forward through this incapacitation, Baker publishes a series of fairy tales about two children, Avery and Zib, and their quest to travel the Improbable Road to the Impossible City.

So The Up and Under began life as a fictional series written by a fictional author. It is a mistake, I believe, to consider the Up and Under to be a series written by McGuire. (Yes, I know it is literally a series written by McGuire. But that is not the most useful view of it.) McGuire is enough of an imagineer to create an alchemist who is not herself and to have that alchemist write books that are not books that McGuire herself would have written. Throughout the Up-and-Under series you will see hints that these books are intended to be understood as having been written by A. Deborah Baker rather than Seanan McGuire. Those hints, however, are more subtle in this, the third book. Into the Windwracked Wilds feels more like a McGuire story than Over the Woodward Wall or Along the Saltwise Sea did.

This is, to my mind, an improvement. Baker is just not as good a story-teller as McGuire. She is distracted from story-telling by her nefarious purpose of sub rosa alchemical education. The characters of Woodward Wall tend to be personifications of abstract concepts, and as such, they are often not believable or easy to relate to.

At this point in the series, we are dealing mostly with characters who were or will be human. We begin the book with Avery, Zib, Niamh, and the Crow Girl. Avery and Zib are of course fully human (although to tell the truth Avery is too wooden to relate to). Niamh, the Drowned Girl and the Crow Girl were once human. Niamh ceased being fully human when she drowned (duh...). The Crow Girl was made into a Crow Girl by the Queen of Swords, who took her heart and her name.

Avery and Zib, following the Improbable Road through the realms of the elements on their way to the Impossible City, have just passed through Water and are now to move on to Air. The ruler of Air is that self-same Queen of Swords, whose hobby is making inhuman monsters such as the Crow Girl. We start with a few transitional chapters (including a prolog "Reminders and Definitions" in which Baker deconstructs the phrase "Once Upon a Time", that will give translators fits) in which the foursome follow the Improbable Road to the castle of the Queen of Swords. She wants to keep Avery and Zib and make them into monsters -- they want to get out and proceed to the Impossible City.

The Queen of Swords doesn't just grab them and have her way with them. That's not how she rolls. She's a shyster who attempts to trick them into consenting to have their hearts and names taken. Thus we have a lot of tricky wheeling and dealing. Windwracked Wilds thus felt to me much like In an Absent Dream -- McGuire's Wayward Children book about the Goblin Market, where making deals is the central activity. Windwracked Wilds is not all deal-making, however -- there's also adventure and mystery.

This is, I think the best so far of The Up and Under books -- there's a fun and exciting story in there. But Baker's voice is still oppressive. As I wrote previously of Saltwise Sea, The Up and Under is an idea that seems really cool in theory but doesn't work out so well in practice.

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