Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an advance digital copy of this novel from the publisher, Tordotcom, via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

One of the highlights of my reading year always comes right on the heels of Christmas, when I snuggle in and read the newest Wayward Children novella right ahead of its release. Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is the tenth installment in the series, and marks the seventh year of this tradition I always anticipate. The tone of McGuire’s writing always immediately draws me in. There’s something lovely and soothing and sad about her voice. This entire series is equal parts whimsical and maudlin.

While not my among my absolute favorites in the series, a title currently shared by Down Among the Sticks and Bones and In an Absent Dream, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is a solid installment. The portal world is enticing and unique. Our main character is wonderful, brimming with aggressive optimism and selflessness. She also offers beautiful disability representation. Hers is a story I deeply hope McGuire continues in the future.

I immediately fell in love with Nadya. Born in Russia to a young mother who immediately abandoned her, Nadya’s early years are spent in an orphanage. She thrives here, always arranging the other orphans to their best advantage whenever a perspective parent comes to peruse them. But Nadya never puts herself forward for adoption. For one, she’s happy at the orphanage. She was also born with one arm that ends above the elbow, though she has never seen herself as handicapped. But when well-meaning Americans come to the orphanage, intent on offering the most broken of the children a better life, they latch onto Nadya’s visible disability and determine to bring her back to America with them and “fix” her.

And then, Nadya discovers her door.

Nadya’s door is less a door than a threshold, a suggestion of a door in the shadows of a turtle pond, which is her favorite place in America. When Nadya tumbles into her door, she becomes a Drowned Girl, an adopted daughter of Belyyreka, the Land Beneath the Lake. The world is strange and lovely and populated with the great love of Nadya’s life: turtles. Here, she finds the home of her heart. She finds acceptance, and love, and adventures that let her own bravery shine. But as with all of the Wayward Children stories, this joyful existence doesn’t last.

I adore this series. I truly do. But my heart is beginning to feel the weight of so many happy endings thwarted. I read the last quarter of this little novella with dread in my heart, knowing that the fierce and wonderful life Nadya had built for herself in the Land Beneath the Lake would end in some way. That’s how the books in this series (almost) always end. And I’m reaching the point where those bitter endings are sitting heavy in my soul. I dearly hope that McGuire will tie these stories together, that wrongs will be made right and that the characters I’ve come to love will find the homes of their hearts once more. And that they’ll never part from that home again.

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is a lovely story, though I wasn’t a fan of the ending. I’m fatigued of the maudlin, and I’m hungry for the bright. But brightness is not the certain direction of the Wayward Children series. Neither are happy endings. I’ll continue to live in hope, though, that happy endings will come someday.

Publication date: January 7, 2025

You can pre-order this book from: Blackwell’s | Bookshop.org (Support independent bookstores!) | Libro.fm (Another way to support independent bookstores!)

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