Bakers, you have one week before your friend disappears

[bloodygranuaile]

 Continuing on a theme of “trying not to fall hideously behind on my Goodreads challenge,” I read the third installment of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, Beneath the Sugar Sky. It was a fun one to read in between episodes of The Great British Bake-Off, although the combined force of both made me crave baked goods that we did not have in the house at the time (it’s okay, I bought apple cider donuts this morning). 

 

I liked Beneath the Sugar Sky a bit better than I thought I would, probably because I was prepared to be disappointed that this one was about a brightly colored Candyland instead of somewhere goth like the Moors, but fortunately the story itself isn’t too candy-ish. The gang of wandering children that visit Confection aren’t the ones for whom Confection is their proper alternate reality; they’re all visiting on a quest and they all seem to deeply hate it right up until near the end. 

 

Our protagonist is Cora, a swimmer recently returned from a world where she got to be a mermaid. Cora absolutely hates the fuck out of Confection because Cora is fat and Confection is the kind of place people would think she likes and make fun of her for it, and she wants absolutely no part of that. Other major characters are Kade and Christopher from the first book, another girl from a water-based world who only sticks around for a little bit, and Nancy, who in truth only gets a brief cameo, but she’s a major character to me.

 

The person whose world Confection is is Sumi, whomst was murdered in the first book. The quest that constitutes the plot for this one is basically that Sumi’s daughter Rini, who wasn’t born yet when Sumi was murdered, comes back in time and across worlds to get our gang of wayward children to help her get Sumi un-murdered, so that she can grow up and have Rini. It is all very convoluted. 

 

Rini is entertaining in much the way Sumi was entertaining, which is to say, they had many funny lines but overall they weren’t my favorite characters; they were outlandish in ways a little too close to ways that people I have actually known in real life were outlandish, and in real life it’s less funny and more annoying. 

 

Overall, though, it’s a pretty good quest story, and still contains a decent amount of gruesome nonsense despite taking place mostly in a land made entirely out of sugar, and I’m going to go eat cider donuts now.