Much like the sojourns they describe, each installment in the Wayward Children series is magical and painfully short.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy Across the Green Grass Fields as much as I did. I was never really a horse girl per se, growing up adjacent to them, with cousins who were/are involved in the walking horse community, but never being that involved personally. I spent just enough time in the stables to get a sense of horses as beautiful but capricious creatures who seemed to immediately categorize me as small, annoying, and soft enough to bite if they wanted to. So an equine fantasy world would not be the first to which I'd think to escape.

But Seanan McGuire's capable pen produced a Hooflands full of centaurs, kelpies, and other hoofed people that I loved spending time in. She carefully renders her characters with personhood that perfectly serves a book concerned with what makes someone a person, and how personhood can be granted or taken away depending upon various factors: someone's standing in society, who considers them either useless or exploitable, and how they are able (or unable) to communicate with others.

As much as I love novellas, I just wish that the characters and ideas in this book had more space to develop. The twist at the end packs a huge punch that the efficient writing serves well, but I wanted to see how it impacts Hoofland society. And I had other questions, about how the dynamics in Regan's found family develop, and about what happened to Gristle the kelpie and Zephyr the peryton.

I think that my nervousness about the series potentially going on for too long and the magic not being there anymore were unfounded. They're still great comfort reads for me, and I'll be on the holds list for the next one as soon as my library has a copy on-order.