Seanan McGuire – Required Reading

Fantasy, Fiction, Graphic Novel, LGBTQIA+, Top Picks, Young Adult

10 Years of Required Reading: Best YA

October 21, 2022October 20, 2022 Shay Shortt

Welcome to the last round up for my first decade of blogging! My reading continues to include a lot of YA novels (particularly fantasy) so this category clearly needed its own dedicated post. Here are five of my favourites from the past ten years.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

by Holly Black

ISBN 9780316213103

Vampirism is a terrible reality in Tana’s world, a raging epidemic that took her mother, and almost cost her her own life. Vampires who choose to feed without killing their victims have spread the infection like wildfire, and the government has responded by sequestering vampires and their victims alike into Coldtowns across the country. When Tana wakes up in a bathtub after spending a party hiding from her ex-boyfriend, Aidan, she expects to find the usual morning-after chaos. Instead the house is deathly quiet, probably because all of the partygoers have been slaughtered by vampires. But in one of the bedrooms Tana finds Aidan tied to the bed covered in vampire bites, and a vampire named Gavriel shackled to the bedframe. Horribly familiar with the risks of infection, Tana sets out for the nearest Coldtown to turn the lot of them in. The Coldtowns are a mix of decadence and squalor, plotting and trading, where the most powerful vampires are internet reality stars. The glamour lures people into coming voluntarily to the Coldtowns with the promise of vampirism and immortality, but once inside, humans become an invaluable food source, rarely achieving their dreams of eternal life. Tana is willing to go into the Coldtown, but she’s also determined to hold onto her humanity and find her way back out. Holly Black makes the vampire narrative fresh with unique rules for her world, and unusual social consequences. At the same time, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was clearly written by someone with a deep love of the classics of vampire literature.

Categories: Fantasy

Every Heart a Doorway

by Seanan McGuire

ISBN 9780765385505

A long time ago, a little girl named Ely West found a doorway, and went on an adventure to a Nonsense world, where she was very happy, until one day she was too grown up to tolerate all the nonsense. Now Eleanor West runs a school for other children who have found doorways that led them home, only to be forced back into a mundane world where no one understands what happened to them. No one except Eleanor. The newest student at Eleanor’s school is Nancy Whitman, and she has just returned from the Halls of the Dead. After years spent perfecting the art of stillness for the Lord of the Dead, everything about this world seems too hot, and fast. Her parents insist on things being just like they were before, meaning colourful clothing, regular meals, and dates with boys, even though Nancy has realized she is asexual. So Nancy is sent to Eleanor’s school to recover from her “ordeal,” and there she meets other children who have had the same experiences. But soon after Nancy arrives, someone begins murdering students. So begins the Wayward Children series, which now has seven volumes and received the Hugo award for best series this year.

Categories: Fantasy, LGBTQIA+

Himawari House

by Harmony Becker

ISBN 9781250235565

Nao’s family left Japan for California when she was young, but in many ways her heart remained behind. Recently graduated from high school, she decides to spend a gap year in Japan, trying to regain the mother tongue that has largely slipped away from her growing up in America. She moves into Himawari House, where she meets Tina and Hyejung, who have come to study in Japan, and Masaki and Shinichi, two Japanese brothers who also live there. For Nao, Japan was once home, but now she feels cast adrift, an adult with the language skills of a young child. Together the girls navigate life in a foreign country, taking their first steps into adulthood cast free of the expectations they left behind at home. The story takes place over the course of a year, and is a series of slice-of-life chapters capturing different seasons and experiences. The sensibility mixes Japanese manga style with the Western graphic novel tradition. Although the through-line of the graphic novel is in English, Himawari House is a story as multilingual the characters who inhabit it, incorporating Japanese and Korean into this tale of found family.

Categories: Graphic Novel

The Magic Fish

by Trung Le Nguyen

ISBN 9780593125298

Thirteen-year-old Tien doesn’t know how to come out to his mom and dad. It’s more than just the fear of rejection; he literally does not know the Vietnamese words to explain what he’s feeling to his immigrant parents. But if there’s one way Tien has always been able to connect with him mom, it’s through fiction, and the many books they borrow from the library, particularly fairy tales. Through the power of stories, Tien and his mother find a way to bridge the language gap, and communicate the things that have been allowed to go unspoken for too long. Blended with Tien’s coming-of-age story are three fairy tales. Trung Le Nguyen uses three types of colour panels to emphasize the different aspects of this interwoven tale. Blue for the fairy tales Tien and his mother read together, red for their real life, and yellow for his mother’s past in Vietnam. Nguyen does amazing work within the confines of these limited colour palettes, employing shading and texture to great effect, alongside his beautiful line work. The Magic Fish combines striking art with a moving family story for an unforgettable read.

Categories: Graphic Novel, LGBTQIA+

Six of Crows

by Leigh Bardugo

ISBN 9781627792127

Kerch is a land that worships gold and industry, and in this respect the slum rats of the Barrel are no different from the more supposedly more upstanding merchers of Ketterdam. Kaz Brekker has spent years building up the Dregs gang from nothing, creating the Crow Club, and laying a territorial claim to Fifth Harbour. With such a ruthless reputation, it is no surprise that a mercher might approach him with an unusual job, one that cannot be entrusted to just anyone. A Shu scientist has been captured by the Fjerdans, and is being held in the impregnable Ice Court. He holds the knowledge of a new drug, jurda parem, which can take Grisha power from miraculous to unimaginable, with terrible consequences, both for the Grisha, and for the world market. Kaz assembles a crew of his best pickpockets and thieves to travel to Fjerda during the Hringkalla festival, and attempt the impossible—breach the Ice Court, and extract Bo Yul-Bayur, before anyone else gets to him. Six of Crows is the first installment in a duology set in the world of Shadow and Bone. It is an extremely well-paced story, balanced between the past and the present, as well as action and character development. I’d particularly recommend the audiobook, which is performed by a cast of excellent narrators.

Categories: Fantasy

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Thanks for celebrating 10 Years of Required Reading with me this week! If you missed the series, you can catch up beginning with a review of my most popular posts.

Fantasy, Fiction, Young Adult

Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children #7)

April 19, 2022April 17, 2022 Shay Shortt

by Seanan McGuire

ISBN 9781250213624

“She did not look back and she did not cry. For the first time in her life, she was leaving a place she loved because she had chosen to do so, and there was power in that.”

Many children who come back through their doorways seek to find them again. They struggle to fit into a mundane world that does not believe the doors are real at all, that any memories they might have of other worlds are simply fantasies built to repress unspeakable trauma. These misfit children find a home at Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children, among those who also hope to find their way home once more. But there are other children who really do want nothing more than to forget what they saw on the other side of their doors, to reintegrate into their home world and forget their travels ever happened. These children belong to the Whitethorn Institute, where the headmaster promises his wards that he can help them forget, so that they can become useful members of society once more.

The seventh book in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series opens on Cora Miller, who is back at Eleanor West’s school after her adventures with Kade and company in Come Tumbling Down. The Drowned Gods continue whispering to her, threatening to pull her back to the Moors. And worse, Cora is that afraid that even if her own door ever comes back for her, she would pollute the beautiful world of the Trenches by letting the Drowned Gods follow her there. After months of nightmares, Cora decides that she needs to try something different. In desperation, she requests a transfer to the Whitethorn Institute, which Eleanor reluctantly grants. When Cora departs like a thief in the night, she never expects to see any of her traveling companions again.

At the Whitethorn Institute, Cora hopes to find a way to weaken the Drowned Gods hold on her. And while she does find that, the methods are extreme, and she also discovers a sinister institution that is crushing the spirits of its inmates. Here we encounter Regan Lewis, the protagonist of Across the Grass Green Fields, who is now an inmate of Whitethorn. On the verge of graduation, Regan breaks down, causing Cora to question the Whitethorn method, and what is really happening at the Institute. But to unravel the mystery she will need allies, something extremely hard to come by in an authoritarian school that enlists students to police one another. Fortunately for Cora, one of her former classmates has followed her to Whitethorn, determined to extract Cora from its clutches and bring her home. Their investigation hints at a possible larger conflict between the schools that may have profound implications for the rest of the Wayward Children series.

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New to the Wayward Children series? Start here with Every Heart a Doorway.

Fantasy, Fiction, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult

Across the Grass Green Fields (Wayward Children #6)

February 15, 2022February 15, 2022 Shay Shortt

by Seanan McGuire

ISBN 9781250213594

“Regan had known from the beginning that Laurel’s love was conditional. It came with so many strings that it was easy to get tangled inside it, unable to even consider trying to break free. Laurel’s love was a safe, if rigid, cocoon.”

Regan Lewis only ever wanted to be normal. Unfortunately for her, fate had other plans. Knowing that there is nothing but social ostracism waiting for her back at school after she reveals a secret, she find her doorway to the Hooflands, a realm of unicorns and centaurs perfect for a horse girl like her. But when humans come to the Hooflands, it means something is coming, something that requires a hero. And it is very useful for heroes to have thumbs and fit into small spaces, after all. But the centaur herd that finds Regan looks at her and sees a child, not just a human hero. And so they decide to keep her safe for as long as they can, until her quest presents itself.

Across the Grass Green Fields is part of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series in that it involves a child going through a doorway to a fantasy world. However, it stands apart in that Regan neither starts nor ends at Eleanor West’s school, and meets none of the series’ recurring characters along the way. It has been suggested that you could reasonably start here rather than with Every Heart a Doorway, but that would mean missing out on a lot of the interconnected structure and logic of the portal worlds. The series is in many ways cumulative, and even entirely separate stories are in conversation with one another.

One of the striking things about this series is that McGuire writes like an adult who remembers childhood viscerally. Not just the fun and the magic, but the vulnerability and confusion, the casual cruelty and fickle whims. The most compelling part of Across the Grass Green Fields is perhaps what Regan goes through before she finds her door, not the adventure that she discovers beyond it. Regan’s playground friendships are fraught, clearly depicting the “strange feuds, unexpected betrayals, and arbitrary shunnings” that many adults seem to have forgotten. In this it reminded me of the complex friendship depicted between Lundy and Moon in the fourth book in the series, In an Absent Dream.

Regan is a people-pleaser, and the only thing she dares to claim for herself is her love of horses. It is not so strange as to get her ostracized by her peers, an acceptable obsession for girls. In everything else, she bends to the whims of her dictatorial best friend Laurel, and tries not to completely lose herself. When Laurel ostracizes their mutual friend Heather for not being the right kind of girl, Regan choses Laurel without hesitation. It is not until Regan finds her door, and meet the centaur girl Chicory that she discovers a friendship that gives and takes in equal measure, and demands that neither party give up parts of themselves for the sake of the other.

Regan’s quest comes late and fast, and is in some ways anti-climactic to the rest of her adventures. She has experienced much of her personal growth in the Hooflands long before she goes to the palace to meet the Queen. This is simply where she proves that she has learned what the Hooflands had to teach her about friendship, destiny, power, and the importance of being yourself.

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You might also like Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker

Fantasy, Fiction, Middle Grade

Over the Woodward Wall

January 12, 2021January 10, 2021 Shay Shortt

by A. Deborah Baker

ISBN 978-0-7653-9927-4

“Are you sure you want an ending? Endings are tricky things. They wiggle and writhe like worms, and once you have them, you can’t give them back again. You can hang them on hooks and sail the seas for sequels, if you realize you don’t like where your story stopped, but you’ll always have had an ending, and there will always be people who won’t follow you past that line. You lose things when you have an ending. Big things. Important things. Better not to end at all, if you can help it.”

Once upon a time, on an ordinary street, in an ordinary suburb, in an ordinary town, two perfectly ordinary children wake up on what should be an entirely ordinary day, only to find themselves on an adventure. Restless and quick, Zib Jones loves messes and surprises, and playing in the woods behind her house. Quiet and steady, Avery Grey is a boy who likes order and polish, and long hours spent at the library looking for the secrets of the universe. Though they are neighbours, these two very different children have never crossed paths, so the paths are about to cross for them, whether they will it or not. Despite being students at two entirely different schools, both children find a mysterious wall cutting through their neighbourhood where it has no right to be, blocking their way to school. On the other side is the Up-and-Under, and the adventure that awaits them there.

Over the Woodward Wall is the middle grade debut of fantasy author Seanan McGuire, writing as A. Deborah Baker (she also writes horror as Mira Grant). Tor describes it as a companion book to Middlegame, one of her books that I have not read yet. In many ways, however, it actually feels like a sibling book to McGuire’s Wayward Children series, but for a slightly younger audience. A wall leads to the Up-and-Under, not a doorway, but what comes next is much of a kind, a portal fantasy with two children on an adventure that is about self-discovery and finding their place in the world(s). This is as much about knowing where you do not belong as where you do, the choices that you make along the way, and the companions that you choose or discard.

Over the Woodward Wall employs a fairly self-conscious narration style, wordy and clever, one that draws attention to the fact that the story is being narrated rather than allowing you to relax into it. Baker does not want you to forget that this is a story, and that stories have rules, even if rules are meant to be broken, or at least interrogated. Although it is like a fairy tale, it is one that warns children against many of the things fairy tales sometimes perpetuate. The Queens of the Up-and-Under are beautiful, but “it is a myth that goodness is always lovely and wickedness is always dreadful to behold; the people who say such things have reason for their claims and would rather those reasons not be overly explored,” Baker warns. Similarly, “sometimes anger is a good, true thing, because the world is often unfair and unfairness deserves to be acknowledged. But all too often, anger is another feeling in its Sunday clothes, sadness or envy or—most dangerous of all—fear,” she cautions.

This book is only two hundred pages, and the ending still came more quickly than I expected, but Over the Woodward Wall is listed as first in a series, so there is likely more to come for Zib and Avery. I’ll definitely be sailing the seas for that sequel.

Fantasy, Fiction, LGBTQIA+, Novella

Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)

June 16, 2020May 30, 2020 Shay Shortt

by Seanan McGuire

ISBN 978-0-7653-9930-4

“Have you noticed that the doors come for us when we’re young enough to believe we know everything, and toss us out again as soon as we’re old enough to have doubts? I can’t decide whether it’s an infinite kindness or an incredible cruelty.”

In the fifth installment of the Wayward Children series, Seanan McGuire continues the story of Jack and Jill, twin sisters who found a doorway to another world in a trunk in their attic. The door opened onto the Moors, a world under a crimson moon where dark powers hold one another in a constant battle for balance. In Down Among the Sticks and Bones, we followed Jack and Jill through their door, and to their eventual expulsion from the Moors. In Every Heart a Doorway, we witnessed their bloody return to that world, and were left wondering about the consequences. Now Jill has snatched Jack’s body, and the twin sisters are locked in a battle for the future of their world.

At the heart of Come Tumbling Down is the nature of evil and monsters. Meditating on Jill’s deceptively innocent appearance, Christopher reflects that “Something about the way she’d wrapped her horror movie heart in ribbons and bows had reminded him of a corpse that hadn’t been properly embalmed, like she was pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside. Terrifying and subtly wrong.” Jack finds herself trapped inside this “charnel house” of a body, ostensibly identical to her own, and yet terrifyingly different. Coping with her OCD proves to be a particular challenge in these unique circumstances, and yet the battle must go on. Returning to Eleanor West’s school, Jack recruits several of her former classmates to help stop Jill before it is too late.

Thanks to the events of Beneath the Sugar Sky, it is great to have Sumi back amongst our adventurers. We know that sooner or later her door will come for her, and she will go back to Confection, but for now she joins her school friends on yet another forbidden quest. As a character who travelled to a Nonsense world, Sumi gets a lot of the best lines, coming out with bizarre yet accurate comparisons and strikingly observant insights. As someone who would almost certainly find a Logic world behind my own door, I always find her peculiar forthrightness strangely refreshing.

The other adventurers are Cora, mermaid heroine of Beneath the Sugar Sky, and Christopher, lost love of the Skeleton princess, and Kade, Goblin Prince in Waiting, and heir to Eleanor West’s school for wayward children like himself. They are none of them suited to the world of the Moors, but as heroes who once answered the call of their own doors, they are no less ready to answer the call of friend in need. It also hints at a school that might be very different under Kade’s management. Eleanor tries to persuade them from the quest, lamenting “I should have reminded you of the rules when Rini fell out of the sky. No quests. It’s so easy to become addicted to them, and so hard to break the habit once it takes hold.” But heroes are not so easily dissuaded.

Come Tumbling Down also draws some parallels to the previous installment, In an Absent Dream. Just as Lundy and Moon’s friendship is slowly poisoned by inequality and debt, Jack keeps saving Jill, even at a terrible cost to herself, and those around her. True, Sumi “got over” being dead at Jill’s hand with a little help from her friends, but Lundy and Loriel are never coming back. Alexis will never be whole and healthy again, despite her resurrection. The outcome of Chester and Serena Walcott’s petty insistence on differentiating their twin daughters and pitting them against one another plays out on a grander and more terrible stage than those wayward parents could ever have imagined, leading the sisters into a final, fateful confrontation with inevitable casualties.

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You might also like Temper by Nicky Drayden

Fantasy, Fiction, Novella

In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4)

June 3, 2020June 1, 2020 Shay Shortt

by Seanan McGuire

ISBN 978-0-7653-9929-8

“You can’t save anyone if you neglect yourself. All you can do is fall slowly with them.”

One day, Katherine Victoria Lundy will be a teacher at Eleanor West’s school for wayward children. One day, she will help teach and guide the children who come back from impossible adventures, and spend every day hoping that their door will return to take them back to their true home. But once, a long time ago, it was Lundy who found an impossible door, one that came back for her again and again. But always, she had to remember the curfew; on her eighteenth birthday, the doors would close forever, and she would have to choose which side of it she would be on. Once, that choice would have been easy, and Lundy would have chosen Moon, the Archivist, and the magic of the Goblin Market without hesitation. But a bargain must always give fair value, and it wouldn’t be a bargain without a cost.

The Wayward Children series began in 2016 with Every Heart a Doorway, in which a series of murders took place at the school, including those of Sumi and Lundy. 2017’s Down Among the Sticks and Bones was a prequel, recounting Jack and Jill’s trip to the Moors before they landed at the school. Beneath the Sugar Sky (2018) was an impossible sequel, in which a dead girl’s unborn daughter arrives at the school looking for her mother, Sumi. In the fourth installment, Seanan McGuire takes us back further still, to Katherine Victoria Lundy’s quiet, 1960s suburban childhood. Friendless by virtue of her father’s being the school principal, Katherine is a self-sufficient girl who “keeps her own company” and finds her solace in books, until one day she looks up from Trixie Belden and the Black Jacket Mystery and finds an impossible door. I am probably not alone in feeling that of all the wayward children we have met so far, Lundy is the most like me, giving this installment a particular resonance.

The Goblin Market is the strictest and most fae-like of the portal worlds McGuire has presented Wayward Children readers with so far. The rules are clearly laid out, and with each trip through the door, Lundy becomes more bound to them. She is slowly growing out of the grace the world allows for children on their first, or even second visit. Above all, she must Be Sure. But if Lundy is well-suited for the Goblin Market, the same cannot be said of her best friend Moon, who was born to it, rather than chosen; it was her mother’s door, and she left her child there. Moon was the first person Lundy met when she came through her door, and that bond will never fade, but Moon only follows the rules because she fears punishment, and whenever Lundy isn’t around, she can’t seem to help herself getting into debt with the Market.

In an Absent Dream is fundamentally about unequal friendships. Differences that seem small and inconsequential when we are children grow with us until they overrun the relationship, and even a shared history can no longer bind us. Lundy keeps paying Moon’s debts, even when she is warned that Moon will one day resent owing her so much, even when it comes at Lundy’s own danger and expense. “No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion,” but Lundy seems determined to try. She binds herself tightly to those few she chooses, and remains loyal to the bitter, inevitable end. Even more so than Down Among the Sticks and Bones, In an Absent Dream has a tragic sense of inevitability. We know that Lundy will eventually make a bad bargain, and we know the end it will lead her to. But, as ever, it is the journey that provides the fascination.

African-American, Fiction, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult

Fall 2018 Fiction Preview

July 31, 2018July 18, 2018 Shay Shortt

Last month, I spent an extended weekend in New Orleans, attending the American Library Association’s annual conference. In addition to meeting up with colleagues, and attending workshops, I also hit up several book buzz sessions, and visited the various publishers in the exhibit hall. Disclaimer: the publishers were giving out ARCs of many of these titles, and I picked up copies where I could, but I haven’t had a chance to get down to reading most of them yet, so these are just a few of the titles I’m particularly excited to read in the coming months.

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

When Scarlett Chen falls in love with, and is impregnated by, her boss at a Chinese factory, the father of her child is elated to learn that he will finally have a son. Eager to secure every advantage for his long-awaited heir, he ships Scarlett off to a secret maternity hotel in Los Angeles, so that their son will be born with American citizenship. Scarlett doesn’t fit in with the upper-class women who can afford such a measure, and when a new sonogram leads to a startling revelation, she decides to steal a van, and disappear into Los Angeles’ bustling Chinatown. What she doesn’t expect is a stowaway, and an angry lover hot on her heels. River of Stars will be available from Penguin Random House August 14, 2018.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

If you love a good Pride and Prejudice remix, get ready for Pride, a young adult African-American retelling set in gentrifying Brooklyn. Zuri Benitez is proud of her Afro-Latina roots, but the Bushwick she once knew seems to be disappearing before her eyes. Her newest neighbours are the wealthy Darcy family, and while her sister Janae seems enamoured of their son Ainsley, Zuri wants nothing to do with his brother Darius. In the midst of family drama, and looming college applications, will Zuri and Darius be able to find common ground? Look for it from HarperCollins September 18, 2018.

Jack of Hearts by L. C. Rosen

Out and proud, it isn’t hard to convince Jack to write a sex advice column for his best friend Jenny’s website. But then the gossip mill starts churning, and soon Jack is receiving threatening notes from a mysterious stalker, who doesn’t like the fact that Jack is proud and comfortable in his skin. Jack of Hearts is already getting buzz for being own voices, queer, and sex positive, and billed as a potential game changer for discussions about sex and sex ed in Young Adult literature. If it’s half as good as the early buzz, you’ll be eagerly awaiting its October 30, 2018 release from Little Brown. (Also, check out that cover!)

Little White Lies by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Fans of The Naturals and The Fixer, take note! Jennifer Lynn Barnes has a new YA mystery headed your way this fall. Sawyer Taft is a talented mechanic, so the last thing she ever expected was to find her estranged grandmother on her doorstep, offering her a six-figure contract to be a debutante. But Sawyer quickly realizes that this unusual offer may be her only chance to discover the answer to a question that has haunted her for her whole life–who is her father? But as she begins mixing in high society, Sawyer quickly realizes that her family’s secrets are tied up with those of other powerful families, and investigating the past may unearth a lot of skeletons that those movers and shakers would rather stay buried. Coming your way November 6, 2018 from Freeform.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

Now technically this one isn’t due out until January 2019, so you can imagine my pleasure and surprise at landing an ARC! Katherine Victoria Lundy is a steadfast and serious young girl, and perhaps the last person you would expect to stumble upon a door to another world. But some worlds are founded on logic an reason, fair value and honest bargains. And so it is that Lundy opens a door to the Goblin Market, and finds her true home. But it wouldn’t be fair value to keep a child who is too young to decide, and so Lundy must periodically return to her own world, and the strings that tie her back there grow stronger with each visit. Spoiler alert: I read this one cover to cover on the plane ride home, and it might just be the best Wayward Children book yet! Set your countdown for January 8, 2019, and curse Tor if you don’t want to wait that long.

Fantasy, Fiction, Novella, Young Adult

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

January 16, 2018January 16, 2018 Shay Shortt

by Seanan McGuire

ISBN 978-0-7653-9358-6

“For others, the lure of a world where they fit is too great to escape, and they will spend the rest of their lives rattling at windows and peering at locks, trying to find the way home. Trying to find the one perfect door that can take them there, despite everything, despite the unlikeliness of it all.”

When Rini lands in the duck pond behind Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, she is looking for her mother, Sumi. But Sumi was murdered three years earlier, and never found the door back to her Nonsense world to defeat the Queen of Cakes, marry her candy corn farmer, and live happily ever after with their daughter. Rini shouldn’t even exist, and now reality is beginning to catch up with her as she starts to fade away. Quests are strictly forbidden at the school, but can Sumi’s friends really allow her daughter to have never been born?

Beneath the Sugar Sky marks the third installment in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. The books do not need to be read strictly in order, but the author recommends reading Every Heart a Doorway before this volume. Down Among the Sticks and Bones, being a prequel, can really be read before or after the first book. But since the plot of this novel hinges on a murder that took place in book one, and continues with some characters from that volume, beginning there is suggested.

While Every Heart a Doorway was about the aftermath of returning from a portal world, Beneath the Sugar Sky is a true portal fantasy that involves examining what happens to the worlds the children leave behind when they are pulled back to Earth. When Sumi ceases to exist, the Queen of Cakes is never defeated, and her prophecy goes unfulfilled. This third installment allows us to visit not one but two of the portal realms described in the first book, including Nancy’s Halls of the Dead, and Sumi’s Nonsense world, Confection. The latter is particularly interesting since most of the protagonists themselves visited Logical worlds, and struggle with the rules of a Nonsense realm like Confection.

The adventurers are Kade and Christopher, who will be familiar from Every Heart a Doorway, and Nadya and Cora, who are both girls who visited water worlds. Together, they set out with Rini for the Halls of the Dead, to find out where Sumi’s spirit went when she was murdered, and if there is any way to return her to her world so that Rini will still be born. The central perspective belongs to Cora, who was a mermaid in the world she visited, a world where the size of her body made her a strong swimmer, protected from the cold water, and not the object of mockery from her school mates. Body image forms a central issue for this volume.

In reading this installment of the Wayward Children, I was unexpectedly captured by Confection, though I’m more inherently curious about darker worlds like The Moors, and the Halls of the Dead. But the idea of a somewhat internally consistent Nonsense world was really good fun, and McGuire used it to great advantage. For example, no matter how far apart they are, nowhere in Confection is more than a day’s journey from anywhere else, and McGuire is able to use this to keep the novella-length plot tight. Her prose is as beautiful as ever, and I just let myself roll with the absurdity of the adventure, including a visit to the Oven, the heart of Confection. This universe has developed nicely throughout the series, and while this was the last guaranteed volume, I am hopeful that we might yet be able to look forward to more adventures.

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