A review by nclcaitlin
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

3.5

Jack and Jill descend a staircase and enter another world. 

Their parents (the worst ever) are only able to tell the twins apart by their personality.

Jillian was quicker, wilder, more rough-and-tumble and so is labelled the tomboy.

Jacqueline was slower, tamer, more cautious and was dressed as a princess. 

But each of them are pressed into moulds without considering their own desires so they end up wanting what the other had. 

Jacqueline wants to run, to play, to be free. Jillian wanted to be liked, to be pretty, to be allowed to watch and listen, instead of always being forced to move.

She had tried to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid, and that neither of them was doing anything wrong.

Marooned by the doorway in the Moors, they are each adopted by different men - the Master and the Doctor. The vampire's daughter, the mad scientist's apprentice.

McGuire knows how to get to the heart of the matter in such short novellas that pack such a punch and forces us to consider our conceptions and society’s perceptions. 

Children are not formless clay, to be shaped according to the sculptor's whim, nor are they blank but identical dolls, waiting to be slipped into the mode that suits them best.