Thank you to Seanan McGuire and NetGalley for the e-ARC.

Though Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is one of the shorter books in the Wayward Children series, with the depth of the storytelling and the time traversed on the page, it felt much longer. It's easily one of my favorites in the series. As the story progresses and Nadya grows older and gets married, I began to question my understanding of her in Beneath the Sugar Sky. I wondered how I hadn't realized she was as old as she becomes in Belyyreka. Nadya has family in Belyyreka. She is loved and accepted as she is in Belyyreka - curious, loving, and wild. Her curiosity as a scout leading to her drowning once again and her being returned to Earth in the nearly eleven year old body she'd first drowned in are a tragedy lived in an instant and a lifetime. This explains a lot about her temperament earlier in the series and her willingness to stay behind in the halls of the dead.

I really appreciated how McGuire handled Nadya's limb difference as a part of her and her storytelling. To be born without something is to not know what it is to live with it, and therefore not to know what it is to miss it. Nadya's characterization, as both strong willed and obedient made for an intriguing character study in the face of her adoptive parents trying to force their idea of what it means to be whole and normal onto her, as she already believed herself to be such. The immediate acceptance and love she find in Belyyreka in opposition to the pressures to conform she faces in America, in particular, makes it feel like home in a way that is tangible and enviable for the reader.

It wasn't until after I finished the book and thought about it for a hot minute, that it clicked that Burian is also disabled. The two choose each other with the understanding that they can and will adapt and grow without the expectation of adherence to any sort of physical standard tied to morality. They grow together with the knowledge that they are just as whole and valuable as the rest of their community. The family Nadya finds in Belyyreka and the standard in that world for the drowned to be enveloped into a chosen family by choice is something beautiful. It's not perfect, as we're shown when Nadya meets Alexi, but it is a world where family is not defined by blood and love is freely given.