In an Absent Dream

July 24, 2020 8:07 PM - by McGuire, Seanan

Lundy is a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should. When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she's found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.
posted by dinty_moore (6 comments total)

Still my favorite series by McGuire.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 3:01 PM on July 25, 2020

Which one in the series is this?
posted by miss-lapin at 6:19 PM on July 26, 2020

It's the fourth one - so it's Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Beneath the Sugar Sky, and then this one.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:35 PM on July 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Ah thanks. I've read the first three. And then I paused to read another book that had just come out. I'll go back to this after I'm done with my current book.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:50 AM on July 27, 2020

I liked the internal logic of the goblin market in this one, and the deep sweet longing and loss of fractured friendship. A slight but beautiful book.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:53 AM on July 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think I'm just tired of this series. It's not Seanan McGuire's fault, and clearly people really like it, which is why it keeps popping up on the Hugo ballot and why I begrudgingly read the next one. I found the first great, the second solid, the third disappointing, and this one to be...fine. I would have stopped after two if I had my way. So that fact colors my feelings about it, for sure.

For the book itself, it was a pretty engrossing story, but I spent the whole time kind of anxious waiting for the other shoe to drop. I didn't remember what had happened to Lundy from book 1, so all the bird and debt stuff was stressful and then wound up not being The Thing. In the end I was frustrated at Lundy, who seemed to understand the rules so well, then wound up screwing herself. I understood why she'd be conflicted but it felt awfully genre-blind for her. The other piece is stylistic. The author uses a lot of Meaningful Phrases that Convey Depth, and I know I'm in the minority because a lot of people find it haunting and beautiful. It just misses the mark for me. "Fair value" is one of those phrases, or the way all their adventures and battles were described (off the page).
posted by j.r at 1:12 PM on August 15, 2020 [2 favorites]