Over the Woodward Wall

If they had to lose themselves to walk this road, would it ever really be able to lead them home?

Getting into this book was initially a bit of a challenge because of how repetitive the writing was in the early chapters. While I can appreciate the stylistic effect the author was aiming for, constantly seeing entire passages basically twice with a bit of  variation just made my brain check out. This approach to comparing and contrasting the two MCs was fun on the first time and tolerable on the third, but after a few pages it was just. Overkill territory.

Once Avery and Zib were out of their ordinary town and over the wall, though, and the story kicked off in earnest, the prose turned a lot more engaging and easy to follow. It was from that point on that I started getting hooked. The worldbuilding here is an absolute delight: a dark, twisted version of Oz, basically, with the Tarot-themed monarchs and the kind of logic that works precisely because it shouldn't. Technically, it's a tie-in for Seanan McGuire's adult urban fantasy Middlegame, and I feel like while I've caught a few clever connections, I've missed a lot more (it's been years since I read that one). But I feel like this book works on its own pretty well. It also feels at least loosely related to the Wayward Children series, if only because of the "portal fantasy + kids" theme, but also there are just... *gestures vaguely* Vibes. There's nothing that explicitly proves the Up-and-Under fits into that specific cluster of words, but also, if Avery and Zib turned up at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children after their adventures, I feel they wouldn't be out of place.

What really captivated me was how the narrative plays with storytelling conventions in so many ways. The Hero's Journey structure is there in full view, almost on the nose, and then at crucial moments there are small, clever twists that keep it intact but also infuse the whole thing with new meanings. I also liked that kind of self-aware nature of the narrative, with all the asides about the nature of stories and how they work. I do wonder if this book truly makes a good middle grade story, though, because I thought that many of the elements I found most engaging might fly over kid readers' heads. Then again, perhaps I'm not giving kids enough credit. And surely there are some more whimsical elements of the book that I kind of glossed over while lapping up the meta commentary parts.

Over the Woodward Wall is a fairy tale with stranger hunger and feathers under its skin, unfolding a winding world in the overlap between strange and familiar.

The MC's are fantastic together and separately, they're explicitly very different people in a way that suits the narrative without feeling like they're caricatures of children. The way their relationship builds and is complicated felt natural and really, really good. They had an amount of emotional progression that fits the size of the story: enough to make this slice of their adventure help the grow as people, but not so much as to break narrative immersion. The secondary characters have ways of looking at the world which feel aching and sharp, for they are of the Up-and-Under which has its own rules to flaunt, follow, or break. 

I love the narrative style, the narration speaks about the MCs in a ways that is explanatory without ever dismissing their sense of their own agency, even (or perhaps especially) when their sense is that they've lost their agency in some fundamental way. The cast of characters is surprisingly large for such a small book, but they're linked thematically in ways that make it easy to keep track of everyone and their role in the story. That archetypal repetition supports the style of this story as a kind of fairy tale. Not that it has fairies exactly, but that young protagonists go to some strange place and meet a variety of anthropomorphic creatures and a smattering of implicitly human but still rather strange characters. For established readers of this author, you'll love this whether you come to this book having read Middlegame and needing to delve into this companion novel, or you love the Wayward Children series and are ready for something with similar bones but a very different look. This book is a companion of sorts to Middlegame, but it can be read and enjoyed completely separately from it. 

Overall I love this and I'm very excited for its eventual sequel.