If you’ve dipped your toes into this blog once or twice, you may be aware that Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children is one of my very favorite ongoing series. These are portal fantasies that belong on the same shelf with older classics of the genre like Alice and Chronicles of Narnia, and newer, soon to be classics like the Fairyland series and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

Each book in the series is a perfect combination of bravura storytelling, gorgeous, evocative language, truly original settings, and characters you will never forget. Across the Green Grass Fields is the sixth Wayward Children book, and while it shares all the above attributes, it differs from the others in that is a completely stand alone story, with all new characters. The other novels revolve, to greater or lesser extent, around Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, and share a rotating cast of characters who appear in various volumes.

Across the Green Grass Fields tells the story of a young girl named Regan. Regan has parents who love her but don’t always understand what she’s going through, a toxic best friend, and a secret she’s not sure how to deal with. Regan takes solace in her love of horses; it’s only when she’s riding that she can be herself.

It should come as no surprise that Regan’s door, when it comes, with Be Sure as always scrawled above, takes her to the Hooflands, a world filled with centaurs, unicorns, kelpies, and other magical hoofed creatures. What happens next you’ll have to discover for yourself, but because this is McGuire, know that she has profound things to say about friendship and family, about what it is exactly that makes someone a person. There’s a quest, but the journey is equally important to the final confrontation. Regan learns that heroism can have many definitions, and heroes don’t always look like heroes.

I somehow knew that the ending to this novel, when it came, would be bittersweet. It was also exactly right.

I hope, at some point, McGuire takes us back to Hoofland. And I hope she continues to write Wayward Children books for years to come.