In An Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4) by Seanan McGuire

Wayward Children
Every Heart a Doorway
Down Among the Sticks and Bones
Beneath the Sugar Sky

I listened to the audiobook of In an Absent Dream, narrated by Cynthia Hopkins. It's the fourth book in the Wayward Children series (nine books strong and a tenth on the way). In the past, I've deemed these books as atmospheric, with McGuire developing a sense of dread in a very creepy way. I didn't care for the previous entry in this series, so let's see if McGuire can turn this ship around.

Katherine Lundy is a serious girl, but she's very lonely. The other kids avoid her because her father's the principal at her school, her brother's got boy things to attend to, and her baby sister's a lot younger than her. So when a mysterious door opens to the Goblin Market, she takes it. She learns the rules there, makes friends, but there's always a pull towards the life she once knew. Will she stay in the Goblin Market when she gets older or will she go back to her lonely life?

What a wonderful book. Lundy is so well-written. The setting is, as always, exquisitely detailed. The ending, as usual in this series, is bittersweet and unexpected (at least, I wasn't expecting it). Within five minutes of finishing this book, I borrowed the next audiobook in the series from the library.  5/5 stars

(You could absolutely read this book as a standalone if you don't want to read the rest of the books. There are a couple of Easter eggs you'd miss, but those are very minor.)

Lines of note: 

Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty because, what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over. (timestamp 2:39:53)

So evocative.

Everything was so different now and so much of it looked the same which somehow made the differences even worse. (timestamp 4:28:04)

This was what it was like when I went back to the area where I grew up recently. Some of things were the same, but the changes made it all seem like it was my hometown dressed up for Halloween. The Mobil station was there, but it's a Burger King instead of a Subway. The Hardware store isn't an Ace, it's a True Value. I don't know why these things hit so hard, to be honest. Everything just felt off.