Finding Your Door: The Importance of Queer Representation in the Wayward Children Series

I’m really excited to share that I recently had an article featured on the website of one of my favorite writers (and humans in general), Stephanie M. Wytovich! I’ve included Stephanie’s THE APOCALYPTIC MANNEQUIN dark poetry collection on my blog before, so being asked to contribute to her blog for Pride Month has been such a huge honor for me.

I discovered the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire a few years ago after reading ROLLING IN THE DEEP, penned under Seanan’s more horror/sci-fi focused author name, Mira Grant. When I realized these writers were the same person, I knew I had to find more, so I went searching, and was very pleased to find that she’d written a whole bunch of stuff I could get into!

I ended up loving this series so much that the first novella is one of my most frequently recommended books, and I’ve reread the series more than once!

From the article…

Portal worlds have been a large staple of storytelling, especially in the fantasy genre, for longer than I’ve been alive – and for good reason! The adventure and possibilities that portal worlds bring to literature are unparalleled, often offering an escape for those of us who found more solace in our made-up story worlds than in real life. You’d think with the inclusion of aliens and mystical creatures and sometimes talking animals as characters, a cast diverse in more realistic ways wouldn’t be too much to ask for, right? Unfortunately, despite the seemingly endless available options for representation that these worlds and fantasy in general provides, our list of heroes in these stories is woefully monochromatic. More often than not, the protagonists–who we as readers are meant to look up to–are straight, white characters from privileged backgrounds who a majority of us have never been able to truly relate to.

But then Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series hit the shelves, and instead of giving us cardboard characters throughout a truly wide cast, we’re introduced to so much representation in so few pages that it’s hard to question why this isn’t the norm.

To read the rest, click here & follow the link to Stephanie’s blog!