It is as if Katherine has a gaping hole in her sense of self and how it is to be a socialized person. Like many kids, she does not understand the vagaries and behavior in her peers – yet she surpasses other children (and probably adults) in her ability to understand the broader picture. Katherine is in many ways a typical 8-year old, but her personality shines in many unique ways. Her mother was round with the impending birth of her younger sister, and her brother was not interested in his much younger sibling. Her father is a plain and ordinary school principal. Even her family was remarkable in its lack of remarkability. She neither dreaded nor welcomed the impending onslaught of events, it just was.

Before that fateful day, her life would be full of planned moments all taking part in a sequence she could already see: School, husband, work as a librarian, eventually children, then death. In 1964 six-year-old Katherine, never Kat, Kitty, or Kathy, always Katherine, realized that her life was going to eventually end someday. Through the words on the page, she followed Alice down rabbit holes and Dorothy into tornadoes, solved mysteries alongside Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, flew with Peter to Neverland, and made a wonderful journey to a Mushroom Planet.” “In the way of bookish children, she carried her books into trees and along the banks of chuckling creeks, weaving her way along their slippery shores with the sort of grace that belongs only to bibliophiles protecting their treasures. This is her story and how she came to the Goblin Market. Katherine Victoria Lundy was six years old. Through it, she strolled down a hallway whose walls are carved from a single piece of wood that seemed to have no beginning nor end, and came upon signs in neatly done cross stitch declaring rules for this realm, this place that could not be: In an ordinary town, on a very normal garden path, Katherine Victoria Lundy came to an incredible tree with an impossibly carved door. In an Absent Dream, book four in the Wayward Children series is a magical and utterly imaginative story about a lost child named Lundy. 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.” When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she’s found her paradise.

Seanan mcguire, I n and absent dream Aboutįrom the publisher, “This is the story of 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. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”― “If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire