Seventh novella in the Wayward Children fantasy series.
Publication year: 2023
Page count:150
Publisher: TOR
Format: print
Cora Miller used to be a mermaid. She returned to her birth world months ago but didn’t fit in. She went to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children where the other students had all gone to different worlds and returned. Cora and her friends had a joint adventure in a world that left scars on her. She’s afraid that the Drowned Gods from that other world are calling her back. She wants to forget that she ever left.
So she asks the headmistress Eleanor West if she can go to the other school for kids who have returned from another world: the Whitecrest School. Except in Whitecrest, the children are taught to forget their otherworldly experiences and embrace the real world as the only one. Cora craves that.
Eleanor reluctantly agrees and Cora travels to the other school, without telling her friends. At Whitecrest everything is different: the kids aren’t friends because that would be weakness. Cora is overweight and she’s bullied. At first, she’s determined to thrive. But then she realizes that something is seriously wrong.
This was the conclusion to Cora’s story. Unfortunately, I haven’t read the other books with her. Still, this was a good story. It examines what it means to be a hero and what you do when all choices are bad.
Cora is a determined girl who knows what she wants. She’s been overweight her whole life and is used to others looking down at her because of it. The only time when she wasn’t bullied for her weight was at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children so she misses it and her friends.
Like the other books in the series, this story is at the same time horrible and wonderful. All the other children had gone through the experience of going to another world. Some worlds were great, others horrible. Most of them were heroes in that other world and they all have problems trying to fit into the real world. The school aims to destroy their individuality and make them bland. Unfortunately, the secondary characters aren’t very deep. Almost all of them are bullies.
I did enjoy this story but probably would have enjoyed it more, if I had read the previous books with Cora.