#1 Every Heart a Doorway ★★★★★
#2 Down Among the Sticks and Bones ★★★★★
#3 Beneath the Sugar Sky ★★★★★
#4 In An Absent Dream ★★★★★
#5 Come Tumbling Down ★★★★★
#6 Across the Green Grass Fields ★★★★★

Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn't let go.

I've come to realize that I seem to start every Wayward Children review the same way: by gushing about how, no matter how much I think I already adore Seanan, this latest book has made me love her even more. Well, I'm sorry to be repetitive, but I'm really not sorry at all, because yet again, this series has wholly blown me away. In fact, I think Come Tumbling Down may just be my favorite yet.

The gates slammed shut behind them with remarkable speed, and everything was quiet, and Christopher knew, with absolute certainty, that not all of them were going to make it home.

Come Tumbling Down takes us back to the world of The Moors, which is probably my very favorite world in all of the doors; with its terrifying beasties and strange scales of balance between them, coupled with its oceanic dark gods and the idea of death as a temporary thing, nothing in this series has made my little horror-loving heart quite so proud. There's an eerie vibe to the atmosphere in this installment that is never scary but always borderline unsettling in the most delightful ways.

Whatever they might have become when they'd been cast out of their chosen homes, they'd been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.

Of course, if all we talked about was my love for The Moors, it would do a tremendous disservice to the pure reverence I feel for Seanan's masterful character-building. The poor lost souls in this series are, as far as I'm concerned, an absolute gift to the world, in this installment most of all. The cast is as effortlessly and wondrously diverse as usual, between Jack's OCD (own-voices rep, at that), the precious sapphic representation, not one but two gorgeous and brilliant fat girls, and more. As usual, it's all approached with such genuine care and thought that it's impossible to miss how much Seanan wants readers to see themselves in her story, and as a reader who saw myself in many of these characters, I'm endlessly grateful for it.

Jack laughed. It wasn't a happy sound, not exactly; it was the sound of someone clinging to the last vestiges of sanity and stability with all their might. It was the sound of slipping.

Beyond waxing on for ages about how much I needed and loved and cherished and adored every moment of this adventure, this time with these characters in this fantastic and twisted world, and telling you that Seanan's narrative voice is my absolute favorite in the world... I'm not sure there's much more I can say here without branching out into murky, spoiler-filled territories. Instead, I'll tell you that I think this series holds everything magical about the world of SFF stories, and that time you spend in Seanan's worlds is never time poorly spent, and that if there were any single series I could convince any of my friends and followers to pick up, it would be this one. I'm so ecstatic that there are at least 3 more novellas on the way, and I truly hope they sell well enough that Tor.com will allow this series to go on much longer, because I can't imagine ever getting tired of the Wayward Children.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to Tor.com for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!