Beneath the Sugar Skyby Seanan McGuire
Rating: ★★★
Series: Wayward Children #3
Publication Date: January 9, 2018
Genre: fantasy
Pages: 174
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third book in McGuire's Wayward Children series, returns to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in a standalone contemporary fantasy for fans of all ages. At this magical boarding school, children who have experienced fantasy adventures are reintroduced to the "real" world.
When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest – not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests...
A tale of friendship, baking, and derring-do. Warning: May contain nuts.
I really like this series so far. Each novella is connected through the Eleanor West School for Wayward Children, but they stand alone.
Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.
The series is a linked set of portal fantasies, where children who don’t quite fit into our mundane, unmagicked world find a door to a world that fits them better. Sometimes they return to our world through a door and they are sent to the School for Wayward Children, as they wait for the door to (re)open so they can return to “their” world. Sometimes the doors open, and sometimes they do not. They yearn for their doors.
This entry begins to define the worlds. There are nonsense worlds and logic worlds; there are watery, drowned worlds, and there are death worlds, reminscent of Orpheus, filled with pomegranate trees. This book focuses on Confection, a candy land world that has been created by a series of bakers, where the evil Queen of Cake is running rampant and must be stopped.
McGuire owes a debt to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, but she has created a whole new set of fairy tales.