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Fantasy. Fiction. Mythology. HTML: Another fantasy audiobook from Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series, which began with the Alex, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning, World Fantasy Award finalist, Every Heart a Doorway. Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third audiobook in McGuire's Wayward Children series, returns listeners to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in a 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.… (more)
User reviews
Beneath the Sugar Sky will let you revisit old friends and learn the backstories of some of the original children. From start to finish, you’ll be engaged in the beautiful world-building Seanan McGuire portrays in each of these novels. And after two books of logical worlds, this new installment of the Wayward Children will show you what a nonsense world is all about.
You’ll visit a world where the sea is made of soda, the sky is filled with candy, and the clothes are made from pastries and chocolate. The trees are filled with cake pops and cookies, and you’ll never gain a pound eating it all. The rules of logic don’t exist, and when the logical children of the school enter a nonsense world, they will have to fight against their instincts and reasoning. If they think too hard about the nonsense, the world will cast them out and all will be lost.
Another fantastic installment in the Wayward Children series. This one was just as creative as the previous two books, and while it wasn’t as dark, the sense of tension and desperate hope was still there. I can’t get enough of this series!
Cons:
When Rini falls out of the sky at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children she’s shocked to learn that her mother has died. Several students help her bring her mother back, knowing that if they fail than Rini will be erased from existence.
This is
Rini is from a nonsense world, Confection, the world her mother, Sumi, went to and was hoping to return to one day. There’s another new character, Cora, an overweight girl who loved the underwater worlds where she was a beautiful mermaid. She’s the main point of view character, which allows the reader to understand her feelings around weight and self-confidence (and the attempts by others to use the first to undermine the second). It was interesting seeing her interactions with Christopher, who went to a world of skeletons and who therefore as unconventional ideas about flesh and weight.
The plot is fairly linear and takes the group to several locations. There are some dangers they face, though not always physical ones.
I thought the mythology of Confection was kind of cool and really fit the kind of world it was - giving it a weird sort of logic despite its nonsense overlay.
It’s a quick, fun read.
In this book some of the Wayward Children set out
What follows is a bizarre quest that follows no logic and is filled with delicious descriptions of delectable sweets. I love how bizarre and creative the Wayward Children books are. They always have some adventure to them, have a very fairy tale feel to them, and are completely unpredictable.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit. There were a couple parts where McGuire tries to get into the “why” and “science” behind the portal doors; this was honestly a bit confusing and got long. However, aside from these parts this was an entertaining story.
Overall this was a good continuation of the Wayward Children series. I would recommend to YA and older readers who enjoy bizarre and quirky fairy tales of sorts. I definitely plan on continuing the series and reading about more of these Wayward Children.
This world of fantastical worlds and portals is always a treat to read. Each book is a novella but packed full of dynamic characters, their development, and the best world building I've read. More worlds are seen in this book than ever before. The Halls of the Dead are burned into my mind with its elegance, darkness, and stillness where Nancy enjoys being a living statue. The Lord and Lady of the Dead force the group into a bargain for Sumi's soul. Confection is a nonsense world where everything is made of candy except for the people. The sea is soda; candy corn fields pepper the land; even the royal guards' armor and weapons are candy wrappers and hard nougat. The food never rots or goes stale and the people never get cavities or malnourished from constantly eating candy. Because of the nonsense of the word, Sumi's death has caused a weird situation where both realities (where she does and doesn't live) exist at the same time until one overtakes the other. All of the worlds, no matter how fanciful, have a layer of reality and horror where bad things happen to good people and people die due to selfishness or greed.
The motley crew who help her are only together because of circumstance, all but one waiting for their chance to return to their world. Each character seen in has moments of insight into them even if they aren't part of the main plot. Eleanor is doomed to see and help so many find their door while she remains aging decade after decade, apart from her own world. Cora is my favorite new character, a girl who lived as a mermaid in an undersea world. Her round shape is a point of shame in our world because of the implications of that shape as lazy, slow, and somehow worth less than other shapes. She proves each of those points wrong but is still affected by the fatshaming rhetoric. Christopher is another of my favorites who is in love with the Skeleton Girl and plays a flute to call the dead made of his own leg bone. I would love to read Kade's story as he was chosen for his world due to his frilly dresses as a child that did not at all reflect who he really was and the warrior became in the end. He is the only one satisfied to stay at Eleanor's home. I love each and every character that comes to the Home and I want to see everyone's backstory plus their adventures in that other world
Beneath the Sugar Sky is another fascinating look into the fantastical world of portals, other worlds, and the people who travel through them. Seanan McGuire's writing is simply amazing. She populates her worlds with women, people with disabilities, transgender people, and people of all different cultures and points of view. Their story focuses more on their friendships whether just starting or extended for years which is nice to see since so many books primarily focus on romance. It's so refreshing to see all types of people going on adventures, not just the able bodied, male, or white. The next book in this series was just announced and I'm already hyped for it. I will read every book by Seanan McGuire or her horror/sci-fi pseudonym Mira Grant.
I think
If you are already a fan of this amazing series then you'll be richly rewarded with this new addition! If you are on the fence about whether or not to pick up this gem, I hope this review convinces you to jump off that stodgy old fence and open your own door to lands you couldn't possibly imagine without a tour guide. THIS BOOK IS SURREAL and CAPTIVATING!! I feel like McGuire's Wayward Children is my own personal door to Whimsy and Logic, Fairyland and Underword and I LOVED every minute of it!!
When a girl falls into a pond beside some of the girls who want to be back in the watery worlds they found themselves in before and demands that they help her find her
It's an interesting concept; a place for those who find themselves displaced; a strangeness that warps their relationship with this world and plays with the tropes of those found worlds. This stood well enough alone for me but made me want to read the rest of the series.
Children disappear for a number of reasons, some nefarious, some with an element of magic. That there are doorways between worlds is accepted, thanks to wardrobes, subtle knives, portals, and other devices so many of us have come across in literature. (I personally believe books are gateways, too, but that's another story.) Sometimes those of us who leave one world and enter another can stay there, sometimes we come back for one reason or another, sometimes we long to return to that other place-- to find the doorway to take us back. Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, provides a place for those wishing to return to their new world from their home world of Earth, or wait for a new door to open.
In the second book in the series, we were introduced to Eleanor West's home and some of the students living there. This book doesn't exactly take up where that one left off, though it does take place after in time. What it does do is focus on some of the other students, peripheral in the original story, and weave a story where they go on a rescue mission, taking them to a couple of other worlds.
Again, a fascinating story -- one which proves there is a place for each of us, and that maybe it's true: those who live in gingerbread houses seem to have cold, cruel hearts.
The book is due out in January 2018, I believe.
Thanks to friends at Tor for sending me this advanced readers copy. You're the best!
This story follows on from
For lovers of portal fantasies, of stories that run on plot not logic, and those who get that heart warming stories don't have to be happy all the way through and quests don't have to be about body counts and character torture.
This book just made me smile, and feel happy inside.
It’s still not quite my aesthetic, but it isn’t as dark as Every Heart a Doorway and I liked how it followed on from that story. (I’ve skipped the second book because it’s backstory about a particular dark portal world. The fourth one is also a backstory; I might skip that too.)
Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always travelled, 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.
Absolutely fantastic. I loved (and thoroughly related to) the viewpoint character, Cora, who is fat and always expects people to react first and foremost to her appearance, and is often
Content warnings:
4 stars
It was a fun book to read; I loved getting more info on new worlds and meeting new characters and learning how well their personalities mesh with the worlds they were called to. One of my favorite aspects of all
I was worried when I read the synopsis that I was going to hate it because it's completely nonsensical and I had no idea how Seanan Mcguire was going to pull it off. It had all the makings to be a truly horrible book full of plotholes and storylines that made no sense. But honestly, it being completely nonsensical was what made the entire plot thrive and I enjoyed it a lot.
Confection is such an interesting world and I love how nothing about it makes sense but somehow, at the same time, everything about it makes sense. Being on the nonsense compass it's not supposed to make sense and that's really where the beauty comes from.
While I still think Down Among the Sticks and Bones is my favorite book in the series so far, this one is just barely right behind it in second place because I adored it so much.
The story itself was also a bit silly. I think it might have worked if the characters were a bit more fleshed out, but there was an inconsistency about what was needed to revive Sumi that was rather annoying.
Overall,I found the book tedious - between the story hitting you over the head with its message of body acceptance, and the silly plot, I will suggest only reading this if you like the first two books.