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A review by librarypatronus
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
5.0
This is such a perfect look at gender norms and parenting. We get a chance to see the world that Jack and Jill from Every Heart a Doorway had gone to - and how they got there.
The girls were born to selfish parents, to whom “the thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred...The concept that biology was not destiny...not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them...alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.” They based their choice about which twin was the tomboy and which was the girly girl on something minor, and despite the girls having five years with their grandmother trying to undo the damage by trying “to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid” the girls grew different and apart and damaged by their parents.
I so enjoyed seeing how they both found themselves, for good and bad, in an environment that they could finally make a choice, until they couldn’t possibly go back. “The butterfly may never again become a caterpillar. [Jack and Jill] may never again be the innocent, untouched children who wandered down a stairway, who went through a door. They had been changed. The story changes with them.”
I would be so interested to see, as well.
The girls were born to selfish parents, to whom “the thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred...The concept that biology was not destiny...not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them...alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.” They based their choice about which twin was the tomboy and which was the girly girl on something minor, and despite the girls having five years with their grandmother trying to undo the damage by trying “to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid” the girls grew different and apart and damaged by their parents.
I so enjoyed seeing how they both found themselves, for good and bad, in an environment that they could finally make a choice, until they couldn’t possibly go back. “The butterfly may never again become a caterpillar. [Jack and Jill] may never again be the innocent, untouched children who wandered down a stairway, who went through a door. They had been changed. The story changes with them.”
I would be so interested to see