Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire is a modern retelling of the Jack and Jill story as a dark and scary fairy tale.   This fairy tale begins with neglectful parents, a loving grandmother, and a terrible loss. The parents didn't really want children, and then only thought of children as a way to look better at work or impress their friends. For five years, the grandmother raised the children and heaped praise on them. But then the parents dismissed the grandmother, and she disappeared from the children's lives. When they are twelve years old, twin girls Jacquelyn and Jillian discover a hidden trunk left behind by their grandmother in a locked bedroom. It originally held dress-up clothes the grandmother accumulated to one day play with the girls. Instead, what the girls find inside the trunk is a set of stairs that leads them down to another world, one under a blood red moon.

Jack and Jill go their separate ways in this new world; the tomboyish Jill stays with the Master, a vampire who lavishes her with fine clothing and an elegant lifestyle. Jack chooses to stay with Dr. Bleak, a resurrectionist who brings the dead back to life, and who takes the prim and proper Jack and turns her into a robust, strong, tomboyish assistant. As a teen, Jack falls in love with the newly resurrected Alexis.

Then, in an attempt to prove her worth to the master, Jill does something dreadful to Alexis, and Jack must choose between family and the home she's come to love over five years.

This short novel packs a powerful punch about longing, love, and the power of choosing to be who you really are, rather than being someone that others expect you to be.

This is a prequel to the novel Every Heart A Doorway, but you can most definitely read one without reading the other.