[Book Review] Beneath the Sugar Sky

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) / Seanan McGuire

Previously Reviewed
Every Heart a Doorway

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Set in our world, in "reality," Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is where those that have fallen through the cracks into other realms and then stumbled back out again find a home.  Our world is not kind to the children remade by worlds of Nonsense and Magic.

"Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible. Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew. Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious. Childhood melts, and flights of fancy are replaced by rules. Tornadoes kill people: they don’t carry them off to magical worlds. Talking foxes are a sign of fever, not guides sent to start some grand adventure."

I continue to adore this series wholeheartedly.  McGuire delivers in each story a painful poignancy and darkness laced through with elements of sweetness.  In Beneath the Sugar Sky, that sweetness is perhaps a bit more literal than in the others.  Rini has never been a resident at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, instead she is a child of Sumi who was killed in Every Heart a Doorway, a child of a Nonsense world on a quest she must complete less she never have existed in the first place.

As always, I highly recommend this series of novellas.

Advanced Reader Copy copy courtesy of Macmillian-Tor/Forge via Netgalley; differences may exist between uncorrected galley text and the final edition.