I didn't finish "Wives and Daughters" because I got sucked in by another book I carried along with me. I had seen a reference somewhere (maybe, once again, Tor.com) to T. Kingfisher's "Summer in Orcus" and wanted to read it, and had ordered a copy from Bookshop a while back.
I started it on the train going up, finished it on the train coming back.
It's - I guess I'd call it YA fantasy, but like a lot of YA books, it's complex and well-written and holds an adult's interest. And it has some....you might say lessons? Or things that make you think in the book.
It was written back in 2016, I guess at that time Kingfisher (A pen name of the author Ursula Vernon) was writing a number of modified fairytales. She also apparently posted it online as a serialized form, and it was later collected into a book. This story perhaps runs closest to the Narnia books, or takes the general theme of "a slightly mismatched group of characters go on a picaresque adventure across a strange land, and they have to fix a big problem"
Most of the characters in Orcus are non-human; Summer is the token human transported there from Earth. She's sent there by Baba Yaga, who shows up (in her chicken-legged house) in the alley behind Summer's house.
Summer has a problem - her mother has obviously suffered some trauma and is deeply anxious (or she always was). Summer is not allowed to do things normal kids do, and she also often winds up having to mother her own mother - telling her things will be all right, listening to her worry, that sort of thing. Ironically that will be the "gift" that Summer brings to the ultimate solution of the problem - her ability to listen and say comforting things.
Her first companion is a weasel (nameless, though by the end she is calling him Weasel), provided by Baba Yaga. In the tradition of books like this, Weasel can talk, and he provides companionship and slightly-tart commentary on things.
Later, she meets up with Sir Reginald Almondgrove, a hoopoe who is basically Bertie Wooster (with a bit of Albert Campion thrown in to make him more heroic) in bird form. He travels with his valet-flock who help him (they cannot speak and apparently have "flock mind" where they are not exactly individuals; when one is killed they do stop to bury him but seem not to grieve deeply, and he is replaced by another).
And then there's Glorious. Glorious is a wolf by day and a cottage by night. He is a were-house (which leads to a clever bit of wordplay in the novel). But this also solves the issue of "how do characters travel across a sometimes-hostile landscape where there are essentially no inns and they don't have a tent. And yes, Glorious not only permits, but seems to welcome them sleeping inside his cottage form.
Later, they are joined by two heroic geese. who are basically guards in the bird lands.
One thing about this story - which sets it apart from the more traditional stories like the Narnia ones, there's a recognition that being in a fight for your life - a fight where you have to kill other creatures (even if they are not really human, and one is pretty badly corrupted, and they are going to kill you first) still alters you and changes you and scars you. Another difference is that there are untrustworthy characters that don't telegraph that at first and it does feel like a betrayal when you find out that that character was NOT good.
But there are "good" characters, who are unambiguously so - most or all of the birds, and Glorous and the Weasel and it turns out that one character was not as bad as they were portrayed as being.
The "problem" the little band must solve is that there's a darkness at the heart of Orcus - beautiful things are being killed and destroyed, and there's fear that everything will become corrupted if the darkness is not stopped. This part is perhaps less-developed, the backstory of "how it got to be this way" but there's good to have some mystery there (it's wrapped up in The Dogs, and it's actually not clear at the end if The Dogs are as good as they were thought to be).
There's also a stained-glass window with a winking saint who informs Summer
1. Don't worry about things you cannot fix
2. Antelope women are not to be trusted
3. You cannot change essential nature with magic
The second one is specific to the book - I have never met an actual antelope woman, not sure I'd know one if I saw her. But that first instruction - well, I've been trying to do that for a long time and I'm not there yet. And the third, if by "magic" you mean "the magic of friendship" or caring about someone or something, well, yeah, that's kind of true also, I think.
So Summer takes that knowledge with her, and also, as I said, her experience in being a comforter and basically parent to her depressed and anxious mother, and manages to use them against the darkness in the world.
Oh, there's a pretty epic battle two thirds of the way through. I had to stop midway through reading it and I admit I shed a few tears for a particular character but yes, the idea that (a) in a real battle, not everyone gets out alive, and (b) it's going to change you in ways you might not fully realize.
And at the end, the door is left open. Summer gets to go back home (and the Weasel goes with her), but unlike Narnia (where the kids eventually age out of it, and the memory fades), Baba Yaga promises her she can go back. (I suppose that's a good reward for saving a whole darn world from destruction; I hope Summer's next trip is just fun and niceness...)
As I said, this is a YA novel, or seems to be intended to be so - no actual cursing, no reference to "romance" other than in passing about how the birds fall in love but aren't monogamous (most birds aren't - and in the novel like here there are a few species that do mate for life). There's some violence, though, and I think sensitive under-12s might find it a little heavy in places. (Heck, I found it heavy in a couple places).
Maybe, also, reading it with the eyes of an adult - where I often feel like I'm called on to "mother" other people without really getting that myself, and seeing what looks like a rot at the heart of the world, and having experienced betrayals where I trusted someone who wasn't trustworthy - made the story more affecting. (I often find that - I didn't feel the claustrophobic crushing sense of being trapped underground when I first read The Hobbit at 8 or 9, but re-reading it in my 30s - well, I felt that.)
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