Across the Green Grass Fields – Seanan McGuire

The premise of the early books in this series is that sometimes children return from Oz, or from Narnia, or from whatever world they were drawn to save. Now, instead of heroes, they are kids who went missing for a long time, and returned with implausible stories. They are not believed or trusted, home is strange, what used to be the normal world is now trivial and boring. Sometimes the returnees find their way to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, where they are at least understood.

In “Across the Green Grass Fields”, Regan goes through a Door as a child, and finds herself in a world of hoofed sentients - fauns, centaurs, kelpies, minotaurs, etc. - who expect her to become a hero. (Humans who enter their world have historically fixed what was wrong and then gone away.) After several years in this world she does in fact address what was wrong, and does go away - home.

The ending is unhappy, in a background/foreground sort of way. We are not shown the unhappy part, but it is implicit. On earth, Regan is an odd child who disappeared for six years. At best Eleanor West’s home is in her future. The world she left behind has probably entered a period of extreme unrest and trouble.

The book was well-crafted, and it was a pleasure to read. It was too short - by which I mean that it did not have the space to develop the richness a novel allows. It was more like a play - a sequence of half a dozen short acts with simple (or at least unexplored) characters.