Beneath the Sugar Sky

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire, 174 pages

Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is a safe space for kids who have gone through a door to other fantasy worlds where they feel at home — and then returned to our mundane world. So the residents at Eleanor West's are used to hearing about other places where the logic is different (or nonexistent). But they're not used to a door being opened from another world directly into their back yard, which is exactly what happens when Rini, a girl from the sugar-spun world of Confection, drops into the turtle pond at Eleanor West's. Rini has come with a problem that only the wayward children can solve, sending them on a world-hopping quest to save Rini's very existence.

This is the third book in McGuire's Wayward Children series, and while I like it and the characters she creates here (I LOVE our narrator Cora, an overweight girl who's hoping to return to a world of mermaids), it's definitely not my favorite installment. Something about Confection and the devious Queen of Cakes seems unfinished, and perhaps McGuire will sort that out in a future book. However, I think the reason that this isn't my favorite is simply that the previous two entries in this series — Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones — are so fantastic. The bar is set very high for this series, and Beneath the Sugar Sky just doesn't quite clear it.