Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Down Among the Sticks and Bones takes place before Every Heart a Doorway, but they really should be read in publication order. If you read them chronologically, a great deal of the central mystery of Every Heart would no longer be one, as such. Here, we jump back in time to see what happened when Jack & Jill went through their door and what came tumbling after.

It's also a story about the kind of parenting that deforms, the kind that sets expectations and does not let children deviate from those expectations, let alone be fully complex little humans with personalities that do not line up neatly into the handy psychological boxes we like to use as shorthand.

The way this is written sounds like a fairytale, with fairytale patterns and moments in the midst of two entirely different stories. So Jack (short for Jacqueline, a nickname she acquires after she and her twin sister Jill stumble onto The Moors) is brought up to be the pink and girlish twin, to satisfy her mother, while Jill is supposed to be the tomboy of her father's dreams. But neither fits those slots precisely, and being told you can't like certain things that are your sister's only leads to wanting them more.

When they find a set of stairs leading out of their grandmother's abandoned trunk, they go down them together, barely sure they have a sisterhood anymore. At the bottom, they have to choose a direction, and they choose The Moors. And from there, it's the story of twins if one twin was taken in by Dracula and the other was adopted by Dr. Frankenstein. Jill jumps at the chance to wear pretty dresses and be the favourite, even at the cost of her own opinions, whereas Jack watches more carefully and decides that the hard work Dr. Frankenstein is offering is more palatable than being looked at as though she were lunch.

As they grow up, Jill becomes obsessed with becoming a vampire, even though The Master she serves refuses to turn her until she reaches 18. She's impatient, leading her to act out. Meanwhile, Jack has become more obsessed with cleanliness, but also finds ways to reconcile that with her work for the Doctor, and enjoys the tasks he sets her. She falls in love with a local girl, although occasional interactions with her sister make her aware of how wary the villagers should be of any connection with either of them.

There's a lot here as well, about paying attention or doing what you've been told you want, deciding that the path laid out before you is the only one, and to be pursued at any cost. It's all wrapped up in prose that skips menacingly through, sounding like a fairy tale, but even darker than the already dark ones out there. It grasps precisely the inevitability that attends these types of stories. This book and the one before it are Seanan McGuire at her poetic best, and I love all her genres I've read so far.

I've said before that I'm a sucker for fairy tales, but that also means I'm critical when people don't get it right. This gets it right, and throws in a little Dracula and Frankenstein for good measure.