Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear / Seanan McGuire

 

3 out of 5 stars 

I have the feeling that Seanan McGuire would be a lovely person to have coffee and a chat with. She and I share many values, which she makes plain in her books. We both acknowledge the human rights of LGBTQ+ people and those whose bodies do not conform to the societal norm, the desire to let everyone live according to their own choices and to use their talents as they see fit, and even the wish that capitalism wasn't so damn capitalistic. We wish for a kind and accepting world, in other words.

This series is meant for young adults. I remember being that age and how bamboozled I felt when confronted by literature in school. I didn't understand things like symbolism, metaphor, or foreshadowing—I was the most literal of readers. (Trying to parse George Orwell's Animal Farm just about broke my brain. I never really did understand it until I reread it in my fifties.) I think that teenage me would have appreciated McGuire's clear and blatant moral messages in these novellas. In my current incarnation (early sixties), I find it somewhat tiring.

So, in this installment, we spend time with Nadya, a girl in a Russian orphanage with a congenitally missing right hand and forearm. She does not perceive herself as handicapped, just as her own slightly different self. That is until she is adopted by an American couple who seem to believe she is defective and who arrange to get her a prosthetic limb without asking Nadya if she wants such a thing. For a supposed Christian couple, Carl and Pansy are more about performative charity than true good will.

Understandably, Nadya constantly feels like she is disappointing them. She is unhappy and lonely, seeking solace in watching the turtles in a nearby pond. Readers who have come this far in this series will be unsurprised when she splashes through a watery Door to the Drowned World, a place where she finds acceptance and happiness. However, a world without challenges can't exist, so Nadya’s life contains some rough waters.

Regarding cover art: at least this dust jacket is not misleading. You see a turtle and you get turtles. Yes, I'm still bitter about the previous book which showed a lovely sauropod and did not deliver.