Hugo 2022 Novellas: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Number 6 in the Wayward Children series and the sixth of the series to be a Hugo Award finalist. Unusually for the protagonists of one of these stories, Regan has a relatively happy and supportive home life but her friendship circle at school has problems. McGuire’s series has children whose lives have a wedge between them and society/happiness and into that gap appears a doorway. For Regan that wedge is best described as toxic femininity deployed by her (supposed) best friend as a way of forcing a view of normality of behaviour on her peer group. Regan’s obsession with horses and ponies fits within these tight parameters enforced by her friend but the trajectory of Regan’s life sends her towards a conflict between her own reality and the myths of what is or can be feminine.

Finding herself through a doorway and into a horse-themed fantasy world (centaurs, unicorns, kelpies), Regan embarks on a hero’s journey of sorts that will eventually place her in conflict with the most powerful person in the Hooflands. The arrival of a human in this magical world is always an omen of change and upheaval; eventually, Regan will find out why.

McGuire is an accomplished artisan of prose and, as always, this story is well-paced, structured and artfully composed. It’s also number 6 in a series and where that series once had interesting things to say about portal fantasies, it is now much more about exploring variations on its own themes. That’s not a flaw in itself. Longer projects become their own things over time and become less about an external agenda. The Wayward Children series is now more of a map of portals and the characters that make the most thematic sense for those fantasy worlds — either as contrasts or as complements or as both. In this case, for Regan it is both as she finds herself in a magical pony-themed world but one in which it is impossible for her to conform or to fit in with the crowd. Whereas other protagonists in these stories find worlds in which they can become themselves, Regan’s experience is more one of becoming so that when she returns to the mundane she can be herself.

The Hooflands mirror Regan’s predicament in the mundane world. The denizens avoid conflict by deferring to a single queen who arbitrates what is right and proper. Regan’s journey through the Hooflands reveals the truth about the apparent monarchy.

I’ve never regretted reading a McGuire story and this one was suitably entertaining and thought-provoking. However, I’ve got to look at this through the competitive lens of the Hugo Awards and there’s just not enough here that marks this story out from the pack (or herd might be a better metaphor). This one won’t be at the bottom of my ballot but there are much stronger stories in the finalists.