Book Review: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Tor

Publication Date: January 9, 2018

This is book three in the Wayward Children series.

Click here for my review of Every Heart a Doorway.

Click here for my review of Down Among the Sticks and Bones.

Nothing in this book makes sense, in the best possible ways, as Rini travels back in time to remedy the fact that her mother, Sumi, died before having her, which is a major inconvenience.

Cora hasn’t been at Eleanor’s School for Wayward Children all that long, and she’d only really made one friend, when a girl falls out of the sky and lands smack dab in the middle of the lake. The girl says her name is Rini, and she’s looking for her mother, Sumi. Only, Sumi was murdered months ago, the first victim of a lunatic who was trying to force her door to appear by Frankensteining together the perfect person. Which explains why Rini is slowly starting to disappear, as her own Nonsense world is realizing that Sumi is no longer able to have a daughter.

Enlisting the help of a small gang of students from the school, they must attempt to undo Sumi’s death. All they need are her bones, her soul, and her Nonsense. Easy, right? But since Sumi died, she never saved her world from the tyranny of the Queen of the Cakes, and she has reinstated herself on the throne and isn’t keen in seeing her would-be murderer revived. But if they don’t hurry, Rini is going to fade away to non-existence.

• Kade is back and fabulous as ever. I just really like his character. There’s something about him that’s both no-nonsense and sad, seeing as how he’ll never be able to return to his world, the world that he was a hero in, and has to find a life in a world that still doesn’t, and may never, except him. There’s something beautiful and tragic in his character that tugs on my heartstrings, but he’s also really sharp and quick-thinking and isn’t all melancholy about his situation.

 

• There’s more elaboration about the differences between worlds. Being as they’re the most unique part of the book, I love how they’re being fleshed out. Cora is from a water world, where she had lived as a mermaid. Rini, like her mother, is from a Nonsense world. There’s more elaboration on Christopher’s world and the nature of his bone flute (which I thought was marvelously done, including the story behind items like it). It’s also explained how the worlds connect to each other. Slowly but surely, the world-building is coming together, and I love each little additional tidbit.

 

• Confection is everything you could want in a low Nonsense world and then some. I thought this was actually the highlight of the book. Sure, our team of heroes all go to visit Nancy in the Hall of the Dead, but that was short-lived (no pun intended) and a bit meh. But Confection, well, it was quite marvelous, from the sea of soda to everything being baked into existence. I love the little nuggets that Rini comes out with to explain why her world makes perfect sense and how our world is the real nonsense (and in many cases, she’s right. What can I say? Our world is crazy.)

• The main character, Cora, is fat … and that’s apparently all she’s got going for her. I know this because she mentions it every couple of pages, without fail. The only other thing she mentions, though far less, is how good she is at swimming. When the series started, I loved the diversity. Now, it feels more like pandering and less like trying to represent underrepresented voices. Cora is insufferable. Everything revolves around her harping on her fatness. She IS her fatness. Sadly, that’s the only defining character trait about her and occupies the majority of her thoughts. If someone said, “Oh, it’s warm out today, isn’t it?” based on her character, in her head that would turn into, OMG, they’re about to mention how horribly fat and jiggly my thighs are in these shorts. Also, nobody at the school seems to think that way, and nobody except Cora mentions her weight except for the bad guy. For the other books, it felt like the diverse aspect of their personality was just something that made them who they were, but it wasn’t all they were. It didn’t hold them back, and they overcame any obstacles associated with it. In Cora’s case, all she does is harp on it, pity herself, and complain about having to actually help other people and go on an adventure. Since she’s the main character, it made it a bit painful to get through.

 

• The plot is … meh. The first book was exciting to me because the premise was interesting and I liked the idea of a mini murder mystery. The second was exciting because we get to LIVE in one of the worlds and learn more about Jack and Jill (so for me, it was more about the characters). In Beneath the Sugar Sky, the main character was insufferable, which left the only possible redeeming quality to be the plot. It wasn’t that exciting, though. I liked Rini. She was adorable. But the biggest stake in the plot was that she would disappear, and I didn’t start liking her until close to the end, so really, there wasn’t much at stake. I had no reason to care about her. Besides that, everything came together easily. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through before there were any real stakes at all, and while I liked that they used skills they learned through their doors to get out of danger, it was really easy.

 

• WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED WITH JACK AND JILL? I mean, I like the series, but the thing that bugs me the most is that there’s this GIANT GAPING PLOT HOLE that I am dying to have filled in. At the very end of Every Heart a Doorway, Jack and Jill head back to their world, where Jack intends to reanimate his sister to save her from becoming a vampire. But they didn’t exactly leave their world on great terms. I can’t possibly be the only one who wants to know what the heck happens with them, as they were big players in book one and the focus of book two. I’ll read book four, and hopefully that touches on it, but it frustrates me to no end that it’s being dragged on with no resolution to that.

I started out really liking this series, and I think I’ve started growing a bit indifferent to it. McGuire’s writing style is fabulous and witty, and I love the quips the characters come up with. For that alone, I’ll keep reading. What was once diversity feels like pandering to me now, though, where everyone is “different” in some way and it’s not just part of their character, but rather, it’s handled more like an after-school special. This one was the worse with that, because Cora’s whole personality seemed wrapped up in two things: being fat and whining. The strength of the secondary characters (and they were fantastic) was overshadowed by me not caring about the main character.

Despite all that, it was a good read, and I do plan to read the fourth one. This is my least favorite of the series, but it was still a good read, despite everything.

What if you found a doorway where it wasn’t supposed to be. Would you go through it?