Recent Reading: Beneath the Sugar Sky
Sep. 3rd, 2024 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rocky41_7This is the third book in the Wayward Children series. The book description is:
When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can't let Reality get in the way of her quest - not when she has an entire world to save (Much more common than one would suppose.)
I'm not sure at this point I will continue this series. Beneath the Sugar Sky isn't bad, it's entertaining enough if you have a few spare hours, but there are a lot of other books out there to read also. The series seems to have almost entirely dropped the conceit of the fantasy protagonist children returned to the real world in favor of somewhat generic isekai plots. Because the books are so short, we don't really get to dig into the fantasy worlds either--not the Moors in the last book, nor Confection here--so they don't come off especially interesting.
That's not to say there's nothing good about Beneath the Sugar Sky. Seanan McGuire has a talent for writing very likeable characters: Christopher, Cora, Rinni, and Sumi are all very different people, but I was rooting for all of them continually. McGuire does a great job of including small details that show how each of the teens is out of place outside "their" fantasy world. However, I think here she struggled with an ensemble cast that was simply too large, particularly with Nadia involved. At any time during most of the book, Rinni, Kade, Cora, Christopher, and what's left of Sumi are all in the same scene together. I think it's very difficult as a writer to pull off many scenes with this many characters without one or two of them coming to dominate the narrative (leaving you to wonder why the others are even there) or without each scene becoming a checklist of who's where doing what.
Nadia appears to have been included only to tease her own adventure at the end (the final chapter is entirely dedicated to Nadia, who has been long separated from the rest of the cast by then), and Kade's presence felt repetitive in a way that Nancy's cameo didn't. We already know Kade's story, about how he killed the goblin king and realized he was trans and was rejected by Prism for being a boy--hearing it all again here didn't feel like an intimate moment where we drew closer to Kade as a character so much as backstory for someone picking the series up here instead of with Every Heart a Doorway.
The protagonist Cora is perhaps the most confusing addition to this questing band, since she doesn't know anything about underworlds or Confection, and never even met Sumi. But I liked her so much I'll overlook that she's the obvious first choice to drop from the quest. There's a sliding scale of representation, between where the representation IS the narrative (ie: Georgia's journey to realizing and accepting her orientation in Loveless) and where it's mentioned once and never again (ie: Firuz's identity in The Bruising of Qilwa). Cora is described in the book as having been "a fat baby, a fat little girl, and a fat teenager." The book isn't about Cora's weight, or the struggles she has with other people's unkindness about it, but it is present. It's presented in a sympathetic and believable way. Kids can be vicious towards their fat peers; for Cora to have grown up subject to that, it makes perfect (heartbreaking) sense how it still affects her. For instance, early in the story she bowls Christopher over while in a hurry and immediately jumps to worrying that now is when she "stopped being 'the new girl' and became 'the clumsy fat girl.'"
But Cora still gets to be a hero. She was the savior of her fantasy world (where she was a mermaid), and before that, she was the star of her school's swim team. Yes - Cora is, far more than the rest of the cast, an athlete. And yes, she's still fat. I thought her character overall was handled very well, and I liked her a lot, and the main thing tempting me towards the rest of the series at this point is that I believe Cora gets another shot at being the protagonist later down the line.
On the whole, the book is alright, and I will keep these in mind for light reading, but presently I don't have plans to continue with another 7+ books in the series. Right now they can't seem to commit to either focusing on the emotional journey of returned isekai children, or being about the isekai adventure itself, and the resulting mishmash is less interesting to me than either alternative.
When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can't let Reality get in the way of her quest - not when she has an entire world to save (Much more common than one would suppose.)
I'm not sure at this point I will continue this series. Beneath the Sugar Sky isn't bad, it's entertaining enough if you have a few spare hours, but there are a lot of other books out there to read also. The series seems to have almost entirely dropped the conceit of the fantasy protagonist children returned to the real world in favor of somewhat generic isekai plots. Because the books are so short, we don't really get to dig into the fantasy worlds either--not the Moors in the last book, nor Confection here--so they don't come off especially interesting.
That's not to say there's nothing good about Beneath the Sugar Sky. Seanan McGuire has a talent for writing very likeable characters: Christopher, Cora, Rinni, and Sumi are all very different people, but I was rooting for all of them continually. McGuire does a great job of including small details that show how each of the teens is out of place outside "their" fantasy world. However, I think here she struggled with an ensemble cast that was simply too large, particularly with Nadia involved. At any time during most of the book, Rinni, Kade, Cora, Christopher, and what's left of Sumi are all in the same scene together. I think it's very difficult as a writer to pull off many scenes with this many characters without one or two of them coming to dominate the narrative (leaving you to wonder why the others are even there) or without each scene becoming a checklist of who's where doing what.
Nadia appears to have been included only to tease her own adventure at the end (the final chapter is entirely dedicated to Nadia, who has been long separated from the rest of the cast by then), and Kade's presence felt repetitive in a way that Nancy's cameo didn't. We already know Kade's story, about how he killed the goblin king and realized he was trans and was rejected by Prism for being a boy--hearing it all again here didn't feel like an intimate moment where we drew closer to Kade as a character so much as backstory for someone picking the series up here instead of with Every Heart a Doorway.
The protagonist Cora is perhaps the most confusing addition to this questing band, since she doesn't know anything about underworlds or Confection, and never even met Sumi. But I liked her so much I'll overlook that she's the obvious first choice to drop from the quest. There's a sliding scale of representation, between where the representation IS the narrative (ie: Georgia's journey to realizing and accepting her orientation in Loveless) and where it's mentioned once and never again (ie: Firuz's identity in The Bruising of Qilwa). Cora is described in the book as having been "a fat baby, a fat little girl, and a fat teenager." The book isn't about Cora's weight, or the struggles she has with other people's unkindness about it, but it is present. It's presented in a sympathetic and believable way. Kids can be vicious towards their fat peers; for Cora to have grown up subject to that, it makes perfect (heartbreaking) sense how it still affects her. For instance, early in the story she bowls Christopher over while in a hurry and immediately jumps to worrying that now is when she "stopped being 'the new girl' and became 'the clumsy fat girl.'"
But Cora still gets to be a hero. She was the savior of her fantasy world (where she was a mermaid), and before that, she was the star of her school's swim team. Yes - Cora is, far more than the rest of the cast, an athlete. And yes, she's still fat. I thought her character overall was handled very well, and I liked her a lot, and the main thing tempting me towards the rest of the series at this point is that I believe Cora gets another shot at being the protagonist later down the line.
On the whole, the book is alright, and I will keep these in mind for light reading, but presently I don't have plans to continue with another 7+ books in the series. Right now they can't seem to commit to either focusing on the emotional journey of returned isekai children, or being about the isekai adventure itself, and the resulting mishmash is less interesting to me than either alternative.
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Date: 2024-09-04 06:21 am (UTC)