The rules of the school are simple. Heal. Hope. And if you can, find your way back where you belong.
No solicitation. No visitors.
No quests.
It’s lucky that the students at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children aren’t used to following rules, because in Seanan McGuire’s latest story in the Hugo Award-winning Wayward Children series, the children have gotten a doozy of a quest.
It was a normal day at the school (well, as normal as a place can be when it’s filled with children who are all recovering from trips to one of an infinite number of fairy tale worlds. So not normal at all, really.) Then a girl wearing a dress made entirely of frosting fell out of the sky and into the turtle pond. Introducing herself as Rini, the girl demanded to be taken to her mother, Vanquisher of the Queen of Cakes and Savior of the World of Confection.
The problem is that Rini’s mother is Sumi, who was murdered in the first story in this series while still a teenager, years before she could become a hero and a mother. And now Rini is disappearing.
“I like existing. I’m not ready to unexist just because of stupid causality. I didn’t invite stupid causality to my birthday party, it doesn’t get to give me any presents.”
This is McGuire’s third foray into the world of doors that take children to other worlds, and I’ve loved every one of them. The series addresses one of the biggest problems I’ve had with fairytale adventures: expecting the children to go back to their everyday lives once the adventure ends. And most of the children at Eleanor West’s school found more than a wonderful place, they found a reality that accepted them for everything the mundane world rejected. The doors they spend the rest of their lives looking for didn’t just lead to a place they wanted to go, they lead to who they wanted to be.
“You were a mermaid, weren’t you? That’s what Nadya said.”
“I still am,” said Cora. “I just have my scales under my skin now.”
Christopher smiled, a little lopsided. “Funny, that’s where I keep my bones.”
The first story of the series, Every Heart a Doorway established the setting (with a murder mystery thrown in for spice), and then Down Among The Sticks and Bones gave us the backstory for two of the main characters and why one of them would murder her classmates in order to go back. Beneath the Sugar Sky feels like the very first semi-traditional fairy tale adventure in this world, something that gives the characters we’ve gotten familiar with a chance to travel to a few of the worlds we’ve only heard about up until now.
Many of the main characters from the previous stories are here: Nancy in her own personal version of heaven; Christoper, pining for the world of Mariposa and the Skeleton Girl who loves him; Kade, somewhat content to live at Eleanor’s school as one of the only children who rejected both this world and the one behind his door just as thoroughly as they rejected him. Sumi’s presence is mostly felt through her daughter (her future daughter, several years in her daughter’s past, unless she stays murdered before she ever meets Rimi’s father who already misses Sumi terribly…it’s complicated).
They’re joined by the outspoken Nadya who traveled to the Drowned World, and Cora the Mermaid. We don’t get all the details about how Cora first stumbled into the underwater world of the Trenches, but we can guess that one opened by accident when she found a permanent solution to the temporary (or never-ending) problem of being active and a good runner and an excellent swimmer and still not being able to make people just accept the fact that she weighed what she weighed, and to leave her alone about it.
…when she had woken up to find herself in the Trenches, she had thought the afterlife was surprisingly kind, not realizing that this was still the duringlife, and that life would always find a new way to be cruel.
McGuire is still expanding the details that I love so much about this series. There are rules about how the different worlds link together, or don’t, and how they’re arranged on the Compass Kade is mapping: Nonsense and Logic, Virtue and Wickedness (and throwaway mentions of directions like Reason and Whimsy). The children on the quest to save the world of Confection run into all of the usual fairy tale elements, like not being allowed to eat anything in the Underworld, or everyone receiving a Gift that they will need later on in the adventure (unless they don’t), and the reader learns a little more about how magic can be brought from one world to another, as long as you keep paying the price.
And there’s also an underpinning of reality that keeps everything grounded, like the fact that a soda ocean can be a nasty place to drown, getting punched in the face by a soldier hurts even if they’re wearing candy armor, and more often than not adventures can really suck.
This wasn’t a fantasy adventure. This was a nightmare of a candy-coated wonderland, the place the kids she’d gone to school with would have expected her to dream of finding beyond an impossible door, and she wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
The world of Confection was exactly what I was hoping for. It’s silly, it’s bizarre, humans can be made from scratch with rice cereal and melted marshmallow, and trying to impose some kind of logic on how everything works can be downright dangerous. But there’s more beyond the cake pops growing on trees and the jellybean bumblebees with clear toffee wings. There’s the idea that worlds like this exist because people needed them to. And the difference between the people who make the worlds good or bad is that some people stumble across a world that has nothing to do with them and try to force it fit what they think it should be, and some people find the world that will make them happy simply because it’s what they always wanted.