Deborah Baker

Deborah Baker is the shortened form of A. Deborah Baker, the fictional byline used by Seanan McGuire for the Up-and-Under stories. Over the Woodward Wall opens that series with Avery and Zib, two children whose very different habits are tested after an impossible wall diverts them from school into a strange country. Their route follows the improbable road toward the Impossible City, where talking creatures, uncertain rules, and competing forms of logic make cooperation essential. Tor.com released the novel in 2020; it later received a Locus Award nomination. The story also extends a literary device from McGuire’s novel Middlegame, in which A. Deborah Baker and the Up-and-Under book appear inside the fiction. Over the Woodward Wall can therefore be read both as a self-contained portal fantasy and as a book crossing the boundary between one imagined world and another, with the pseudonymous authorship forming part of its design.