SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Wayward Children is Seanan McGuire's most critically/award-regarded series I think, having picked up both a Hugo and Nebula for its first novella, Every Heart a Doorway, and nominations for its second novella: Down Among the Sticks and Bones.  The series deals with the effects of Portal Fantasy adventures on children - where kids/teens are taken on adventures in portal fantasy worlds and then find themselves spit out back on our world, longing to go back.  I've found myself kind of on the opposite side of mainstream opinion towards the series:  I just haven't really enjoyed it that much, despite my loving other works of McGuire.

Still, with this third novella nominated for a Hugo and part of the Hugo packet, I opted to give Beneath the Sugar Sky another shot.  And, to my surprise, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  The novella returns to the present-day storyline of the first novella (it seems every other novella in the series will be a prequel), adds a new enjoyable main characters to a few old ones, and features a plot that I actually enjoyed and found interesting.  There's a good shot I'll be picking up the fourth novella in this series now, at some point anyway.


Quick Plot Summary:  Cora is a relatively new student at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, having been locked out of her mermaid world.  Outside of that world -  in our world - she's always felt ostracized by others - called fat and other harmful names for her figure and she's not sure the school will be much different, strange as the other students are.  But when a young girl named Rini drops out of the sky and into a pond at the school and claims to be looking for Rini's mother - a girl who died at the school a little while ago, Cora finds herself, along with several other classmates forced to go on an adventure through several worlds to try and find a way to bring back Rini's mother before Rini disappears from a lack of causality.  An adventure that will be unlike anything she experienced in her own world, and force her to face a new understanding of how adventures really look from another perspective.

Thoughts:  My main issue with both of the first two Wayward Children novellas was never about the setup or the characters, both of which were interesting on the surface: but rather the plots of each novella were incredibly predictable and kind of boring.  That's not the case with Beneath the Sugar Sky, whose adventure takes the characters through a multitude of interesting worlds with interesting differences and directions.  And again, like its predecessors, the book does have really interesting characters: new protagonist Cora is really strong, as is Rini, the other new member of the group, while the further development of Kade and Christopher from the first novella is also done well.  The ending continues a trend from the first novella which kind of feels unearned, but it's almost kind of tacked on to the point where it doesn't matter this time, so I didn't mind it as much.  All in all, a quality novella worth your time.