“Be sure.”
Every person in Eleanor West’s Home For Wayward Children has their own backstory of the fairytale world they stepped into, and their own reason for desperately wanting to go back. In Seanan McGuire’s latest novella in her Wayward Children series we visit the world of the Goblin Market, a place that falls solidly in the category of Logic/Virtue (with maybe a hint of Whimsey/Wild), and which will offer you anything your heart desires as long as you never forget to pay the price.
McGuire isn’t just exploring all the different worlds that fairytale portals can open onto, she also seems to be taking a hard look at every type of child who’s unhappy enough to need a portal. Most of the ones we’ve seen before have been variations on unhappiness caused by parental neglect and/or the world refusing to accept them as they really are. The star of this story, Katherine Lundy, has managed to find a happiness that works for her (more or less), and she actually has parents who love her very much. It’s just that they somehow missed the point where their friendless daughter decided you can’t be lonely if you make yourself like being alone.
She was Katherine Lundy. Her family loved her as Katherine Lundy. If the children in the yard next door or on the playground couldn’t find her worth loving the same way, she wasn’t going to change for them.
Quiet, bookish Katherine has already learned at eight years old that if you’re polite to adults and learn all the rules, you can find all the ways to make the rules work for you, even if it’s just to make sure no one bothers you. So it’s the best kind of luck that just when she’s decided on the safe, boring, mostly unnoticed life she’s going to lead, she stumbles across a tree with a door, one that takes her through an impossible hallway into a fantastical market city where happiness is yours for the taking as long as you follow the rules.
If a carnival and a farmer’s market and a craft fair all decided to happen at the same time, in the same field, the result might have been something like what was in front of her.
The Goblin Market is one of the most gloriously fun settings I’ve seen for a story. I’ve always loved a good fantasy/sci-fi/pseudo-medieval market scene, and here we have an entire town where fairies and trolls hunt for bargains and everything is for sale. The economy is barter only; the Goblin Market is one of the few portals that people can use multiple times – which becomes very important later – so there’s no sense hoarding money if you end up stepping back through the tree and staying away for two years. You can trade anything you have, from your socks to a strand of your hair, and if you want to set up a deal where the nice unicorn/centaur man will provide you a pie a day for a year in exchange for some mostly used pencils, then all you have to do is make sure everyone involved agrees that they’ve gotten fair value.
That’s the key phrase: fair value. The entire story centers around it. The punishment for not honoring a deal or not giving fair value is something that can be annoying, or terrifying, and every citizen of the Goblin Market learns at an early age to avoid phrases like “I’ll pay anything…” The value of something can change depending on how much you need it, and how much the current owner thinks they can make you pay.
The timeline jumps in this story can be startling, as Katherine spends weeks, and then years, in the world behind the door in the tree. There are all sorts of adventures that are only mentioned briefly (the story of saving the Goblin Market from the Wasp Queen sounds like something that McGuire could write an entire story around), and sometimes things are dark and dangerous. But so many moments in the other world are magical and golden, a place where Katherine has her first real friend (one who maybe isn’t so good at giving fair value), a job sorting books the way she always dreamed of doing, pies every day, and a life in a place where the Market itself makes sure everything is fair. Or else.
It can be easy, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers.
It’s such a perfect fantasy world, with such an intriguingly complex set of rules, and I could already imagine racing through the tree-hallway to the Market with a backpack full of buttons and pencils to trade for pies and a hearth to sleep on.This is probably my favorite installment of the whole series so far.
And I think that’s partly why this one also hurts more than any of the others as well.
McGuire makes it very clear that this isn’t a fairy tale, it’s a cautionary tale. Once you get past the pies and books and feathers, you reach what I think is really at the heart of all the stories where the children grow up and have to leave fairyland forever. It’s not that only children are allowed to have adventures or dreams, it’s that part of growing up is realizing that choosing something means deliberately not choosing something else. Once you see that, you have to decide if the value of what you want is worth the pain it causes for everyone else.