In an Absent Dream is the fourth book in Seanan McGuire’s “Wayward Children” series, and gives us the backstory of Lundy, a character from the first book. Lundy, like the other characters in this series, goes through a magic portal to another world when she’s a child. The world she goes to is the Goblin Market, and she can actually keep going back and forth between it and our world—until she turns eighteen. When the book opens, it’s 1964 and Lundy (full name: Katherine Victoria Lundy) is eight, though we also see a scene from a few years earlier, when she turned six. She has an older brother and a younger sister, and her parents are fine, though her dad’s job as the principal of the elementary school she attends makes things hard for her: no one wants to be friends with the principal’s daughter. But Lundy is happy to entertain herself: she’s a bookish kid, fine with her own company or that of adults. At the start of summer vacation when she’s in second grade, though, something happens: she’s walking home, lost in a book, and ends up in the woods instead of in her neighborhood. She knows where she is/it’s a path she’s been on before—but now there’s a tree in the middle of the path that definitely wasn’t there before. And in the tree is a door, carved with images of fruit and the words “Be Sure.” When she goes through the door, there’s a hallway, which introduces her to the Goblin Market’s rules, and then she emerges into the Market itself, a place full of human and non-human creatures that feels like “a carnival and a farmer’s market and a craft fair” all at once (41).
At the Market, Lundy meets a girl her age, who says to call her Moon, and who says she’ll take her to the Archivist, who will explain the Market’s rules. The Market, it turns out, is based on barter and the idea of “fair value,” which the Market itself magically enforces: if you don’t give fair value, you’ll go into debt, and if you go into debt, you can lose yourself in a way I won’t describe because it’s impossible to do so without being spoilery.
I liked reading about the Market, which the Archivist describes as “a place where dreamers go when they don’t fit in with the dreams their homes think worth dreaming” (56-57). But if the last book in this series felt too plot-driven to me, this one was the opposite: Lundy has adventures in the Market but they’re described in asides; most of what we see is her daily life in the Market, or at home, as she travels back and forth between the two worlds. Daily life in the Market is interesting, though: I mean, I love this:
There was a woman in a wheelchair with a shaggy golden dog whose fur flickered around the edges, like it was burning without being consumed. There was a man with four arms, weaving ribbons into beautiful ropes with the speed and ease of a lifetime spent in long practice. There was a centaur of a sort, half human and half unicorn, a single spiraling horn rising from his forehead, taking a tray of meat pies out of an oven large enough to hold an entire bakery. (64)
And of course, the traveling back and forth has its drama too. The first time Lundy goes to the Market she’s an eight-year-old kid who has disappeared on her way home from school: her mom thinks she’s been kidnapped. After she disappears again, when she’s 10, she’s sent to boarding school when she comes back, but she’s determined to go back to the Market, to be with Moon and the Archivist again (and she does, though if you’ve read Every Heart a Doorway you may remember how things end up). The later part of the book, when Lundy’s older and wrestling more with the tension between what she wants and what others want from her, was more compelling to me than the beginning, and this definitely isn’t my favorite book in the series—but I’m glad I read it and I’m sure I’ll pick up the next one when it comes out.
Leave a Reply