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

Every Heart a Doorway
Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Beneath the Sugar Sky is the third installment in the Wayward Children series of novellas. I thought the first two books were really well done, with really interesting characters and worldbuilding and that forbidding sense of doom that McGuire does so well.

In this book, we meet Cora, a fat girl who knows people judge her appearance because she's fat and did you know she's fat? Then Rini comes out of a pond at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children and suddenly we're on a quest that takes us from world to world.

Honestly, because there were so many characters (Rini and Cora, who are new; and Christopher, Kade, and Sumi, who are not - there's also a brief appearance by Nancy from the first book), and the book was only 174 pages, there just wasn't time to develop the characters. Because of this, I just didn't...care? Cora's inner monologue about her weight was exhausting. I'm sure that there is trauma around it, but it was unrelenting and just made her a one-note kind of person. Rini was perky and just a bit too goal-oriented and was also one-note. I just wanted to know more about these characters to get invested in them. 

Much of this book took place in a Nonsense world filled with baked goods and because the setting seemed a bit technicolor and silly, it just didn't have the same sense of dread that I really enjoyed in the first two books. And since I didn't care much for the characters and the setting wasn't as strong, it just sort of fell flat. 

I'll definitely read more in the series based on the strengths of the first two books, but I thought this one was the weakest so far.

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

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. (location 35)

"Sometimes that's all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don't have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is." (location 1475)