Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2)

by Seanan McGuire

It can be easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.

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.

Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.