Review: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Title: Beneath the Sugar Sky
Series: Wayward Children #3
Author: Seanan McGuire
Source/Format: Borrowed from the library; Hardcover
More Details: Fantasy
Publisher/Publication Date: Tor.com; January 9, 2019

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

Note: this synopsis contains spoilers for Every Heart a Doorway. 

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.

**Note: this review may contain minor spoilers for Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones. You have been warned.**

So far I’m really enjoying the Wayward Children series, and I’m determined to get caught up with all the current books before Come Tumbling Down comes out next year. After I read Down Among the Sticks and Bones, I was more than excited to finally pick up Beneath the Sugar Sky. The synopsis had me excited for all the possibilities the story could hold, and it turned out to be everything I was looking for.

I loved this story. Not only were more of the other worlds visited in Beneath the Sugar Sky—like Confection and The Halls of the Dead—I also got see to all of my favorite characters again including Nancy, Kade, and of course Eleanor West—who had a rule about no quests, and while it finally got broken, it was for a good reason.

No matter how brief it was, it was also great to be back in Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Since beneath the Sugar Sky wasn’t a prequel like Down Among the Sticks and Bones, I got more of what I wanted, which was to see what happened to the characters after the way Every Heart a Doorway ended. There were a few new characters, like Cora, who had recently left her own world. I liked her character, and she reminded me a little of Nancy in Every Heart a Doorway. Like her—like most of the students at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children—Cora had reasons to want to remain in her fantasy world, but ultimately she had to adjust to the sudden changes in her life after that door was shut. One thing that this series does well is how it addresses relevant issues by directly incorporating them rather than shying away from, or only hinting at them. So it often came up as something one or more of the characters had to deal with. Beneath the Sugar Sky also does this with Cora’s character. There was also Rini who, at times, spoke quite frankly, but she was a thoroughly entertaining character (I would take a story entirely from her perspective, I’m just saying).

Beneath the Sugar Sky was an excellent and highly entertaining sequel to Down Among the Sticks and Bones. I plan to read In an Absent Dream as soon as my library hold comes in.