Even here in the Up-and-Under, where water could have opinions and people could be seasons, there was a cost for the things people might want to give you.
Nothing came for free.
A. Deborah Baker (pen name of Seanan McGuire) continues the adventures of Avery and Zib in the second book of The Up-and-Under series: Along the Saltwise Sea.
Book One took Avery and Zib over the wall and introduced us to the world of The Up and Under, where the Improbable Road to the Impossible City can only be found if you’re not looking for it, young girls can also be a flock of crows, and everything has a cost. Book Two has…all of these things as well. But it also has pirates, and magical storms, and Wishing Wells that are of course not what everyone always thinks they are.
“They grant wishes?” asked Avery, as Zib pulled the bucket toward herself.
“No, not at all,” said Niamh. “What a queer notion, a well granting wishes! Might as well ask for grass to set the table, or clouds to control the weather. No, wishing wells are wells that have been wished for.”
It’s been a while since I reviewed the first book, so for anyone new to the story, The Up And Under was featured in Seanan McGuire’s book Middlegame. Originally it was a series of children’s books written by one of the characters as part of a plan to reshape the entire world. McGuire decided to follow up Middlegame by writing the actual Up and Under series, and created something whimsical and funny and touching, while also being surprisingly dark, in ways that I’m sure many kids would really enjoy (their parents might think it’s a bit too dark for young readers, but the author obviously credits children for being a lot hardier than that.)
“Long ago and far away, when summer tides were kinder, there lived a drowned girl from the city of eternal winters. She was very cold, always, for she had drowned when she was but an infant, falling out of her father’s fishing boat and into the water without even the opportunity to scream…”
(That’s really the darkest part of the book, but seriously, the Up And Under has an entire underwater city where the only way families can have a child is to claim a drowned baby. That’s pretty darn dark.)
The Up-And-Under is the same gorgeously realized fairy-tale world as it was in the first book, but the characters are not – as Zib and Avery’s companions The Drowned Girl Niamh and The Crow Girl have to remind them – inside an actual fairy-tale. There aren’t any morals or straightforward magic rules here, and there’s no guarantee that everyone they meet is going to treat them fairly.
Avery and Zib are also at that complicated stage of childhood where they’re young enough to still be questioning the “why” of everything, every story, every creature, every rule. But they’re also old enough that they’ve already been imprinted with what adults have told them the world is supposed to be, so they keep bumping painfully into situations where what they know is true…isn’t.
How can a plant think anything? Plant’s don’t have brains.”
“And roads can’t move, and flocks of crows can’t become girls when they want to enjoy the luxury of thumbs,” said Niamh. “You need to break your addiction to the idea that anything is impossible. Things don’t have to be possible to be true.
Avery and Zib are both still learning about each other as well. The charming but shy bookworm and the rambunctious tomboy haven’t reached the stage where they know they’ve found their soulmate, the one person in the world who has everything they didn’t know they needed in a friend, but they’re getting there. In the meantime they’re still learning all the ways that their new friend is valuable, while having to recognize all those dark, mean parts of their own personality that deals with sadness and fear by lashing out at the nearest target.
The trick with second selves is not learning how to get rid of them – which can’t be done, no matter how hard a person tries – but finding a way to teach them to be kinder, one simple step at a time.
This story has some very subtle lessons for children about how we hurt and help each other without even realizing it. But, and this is very important, it also has pirates! The four companions accidentally trespass on the property of a pirate queen and have to spend a week aboard her suspiciously clean and comfortable pirate ship working off their debt. The children’s ongoing quest to find the Queen of Wands and get back to their homes doesn’t move ahead too far in this volume, but that means a good part of the book feels like a week-long holiday. And McGuire describes everything in lovely details, whether it’s a flock of crows settling on the walls of a helpful well, or a morning spent picking berries in a fog-drenched garden, or a delicious meal in a pirate galley, or a drowned girl happily dancing a ship’s deck dry or being an utter bad-ass with a control over water that we simply never realized she had.
The kingdom of the Up-and-Under has become even more complex, sometimes to the point where the information was going right over my head. I may have to re-read this or get a chart so I can remember things like the nicknames for each country, and which one is controlled by the King of Coins, and why the Page of Frozen Waters is so dangerous, and which season is owned by the Queen of Swords. There’s a little more exposition than action in this volume, except at the very ending when there’s terrifying battle and a Great Big Development, but we’ll have to wait until the next book (Into the Windwracked Wilds) comes out in October to see how it’s going to affect the story.
Cover art by David Curtis