Where the Drowned Girls Go – Seanan McGuire

The Whitehorn school is awful, and McGuire does a technically-excellent job of evoking its awfulness. It is awful in a sense that mundane institutions can become awful - doing horrible things to children for what is perceived to be their own good. (Would the school be less awful if its stated goal of weaning the students from their other-world attachments were in the students’ best interests? Would it be less awful if the students were delusional and had never been to other worlds?)

Despite the technical virtuosity, there isn’t much story, and what story there is doesn’t have much structure. We are introduced to the school, and the introduction is well-written. There is a plan to escape from the school. I won’t write a spoiler for how it ends, but it ends suddenly and anti-climactically.

There school itself requires a different suspension of disbelief than Eleanor’s. Its continued existence requires enormous resources, a lack of any sort of oversight, hundreds of oblivious parents, and (okay, some spoiler required) strong magic on Earth. I found that distracting.