McGUIRE, Seanan. Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children). Tor. 2016. 176p.
McGUIRE, Seanan. Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children). Tor. 2017. 192p.
McGUIRE, Seanan. Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children). Tor. Jan. 9, 2018. 176p. $17.99.
"Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven't always restricted their travel to the possible."
(from Beneath the Sugar Sky)
Crack the pages of any of these three books and you'll quickly understand and why the first of the three, Every Heart a Doorway, was nominated for the 2017 World Fantasy Award and swept all four other major awards: Hugo, Alex, Locus and Nebula. Nor are these the first of McGuire's kudos: in 2010, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and in 2013, was the first person ever nominated in five different categories on the Hugo ballot. She is outstanding, both as writer and imaginer. In a genre that practically calls for Purple Prose, she eschews it. Poetic? Yes, her prose is, startlingly so. But it isn't overwritten. It's brutally ironic at places, sometimes lush in description, but she is above all an economical writer. When she puts down a phrase or sentence, there's a reason for it. There is no excess verbiage or extraneous narration in these short, deadly works of adult fantasy.
The premise is simple. Some children are unhappy in the world they live in or perhaps in their own bodies, so they find doors. They go through the doors and they're in different worlds. The worlds range from severely Logical to outright Fantasy and can be cruelly harsh or lovingly supportive. If then somehow, something goes wrong and these same children tumble back through doors into our world, they are unhappy and dislocated, because our world isn't sorted out by people's needs. They find that their parents want them back exactly the same as they were before they disappeared, but they're not the same anymore. They have new needs and desires. The children want to return to the worlds they left but they can't find the doors now. There is a place for them though, and it's Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. Miss West is a Wayward Child herself. But even if somehow she found her door again, she's too old now to return: she hopes against hope that when she gets older yet, nature will make her a child again -inside her head. Then maybe her world will readmit her.
In Every Heart a Doorway, Nancy comes back from the World of the Dead. She makes friends of sorts at the Home but all she really wants is to return to the world that matches her and spend eternity teaching herself not to move or breath, to live as a human statue in the court of the King and Queen of the Dead once more. Her earthside friends start to die: one's eyes missing, another losing her hands… Someone is killing them off. The denouement is abrupt and chilling but in the context of the book's logic, it makes sense. Brr!
Down Among the Sticks and Bones continues the story of the first book. It narrates the back story of Jack and Jill, who are two of the characters in the previous book. They're twins whose parents forced them to be different, one a boy, one a girl, even though they're both girls, neither given a choice as to what they can be or how they should behave. They pass through a door that leads to a world that is a mixture of the scariest parts of Frankenstein and Dracula. It's a windswept moor, dark and gloomy, and it's populated by vampires, werewolves, a mad scientist and perpetually scared peasants. Jill ends up in thrall to a vampire, Jack apprentices to the scientist, and from that point on, their paths, even personalities, diverge. This is by far the most jolting and bleakest of these three tales. The ending sets you up for the previous book, where the story of Jack and Jill is continued.
In the third of these books, Beneath the Sugar Sky, young woman, Rini, falls out of the sky into a pond near the Home. She's looking for her mother, Sumi, one of the murdered girls in book 1. Time is out of whack between the world she came from, one made of candy and confectionery (only the humans aren't candy), and our world. Her mother has been murdered here before she could return to the candy cane world and give birth to her daughter. Now Rini is fading away. There are gaps in her body -a finger here, a shoulder, half a face-- just gone, replaced by … nothing. Her world is rewriting its story to match Sumi's death and there's no place in the new story of Rini. Aided by three other children, Rini embarks on a quest: they journey through worlds in a race against time to find and resurrect Sumi and thus save Rini from extinction.
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ARC provided by Tor in exchange for an honest review.This was my 100th review of 2017! And I couldn’t have picked a better book! Beneath the Sugar Sky is another amazing installment in the Wayward Children series and it starts out right back at Eleanor West’s magical boarding school. And this book heavily centers around one of my favorite characters from Every Heart a Doorway, Sumi!“There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.”This series is a portal fantasy, that surrounds kids that have traveled to magical lands, but somehow found their way back to our world. For the most part, the kids want to go back to their magical lands, so they reside at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, while waiting and hoping for their door to reappear for them. In this story, we get to see a lot of different portal worlds. And we get to see many beloved and familiar faces, while also learning about some new characters and their different magical worlds.“Nobody promised me a happy ending. They didn’t even promise me a happy existence.”In Beneath the Sugar Sky we follow five kids on an adventure:➽Cora – plus sized, has anxiety, from the Land Beneath the Lake, which is a Mermaid land!➽Nadya – missing an arm, from Belyyreka, a Drowned World.➽Christopher – Mexican-American, had cancer, from Mariposa, a skeleton Underworld.➽Rini – Japanese, from Confection.➽Kade – Trans, from a warring Fairyland! (Full disclosure, Kade has been my favorite character since the very first book in this series. His story speaks to the very essence of my heart, and I love everything about him. Kade is one of the best characters in all of literature, and I wish everyone could read about him and his journey, and I just had to emphasize how very important he is to me.)“It took me years of saving a world that stopped wanting me when I changed my pronouns to figure it out.”And even though we dabble in many portal worlds, this story mostly takes place in Confection, which is pretty much a real-life version of Candy Land. It’s sugar, it’s sweet, and it’s downright dangerous.And as you can probably tell from my breakdown above, every book is this series has amazing diversity and representation, and this book is no different. From race, to sexuality, to mental illnesses, to body representation, to physical disabilities, to religious representation, this series has it all. And it’s seamlessly woven and never feels exploitative. And this particular book has the best overweight representation I’ve ever read, or even seen, in my entire life.“She’d heard that sort of hatred before, always from the women in her Weight Watchers groups, or at Overeaters Anonymous, the ones who had starved themselves into thinness and somehow failed to find the promised land of happy acceptance that they had always been told waited for them on the other side of the scale.”This book is a masterpiece that I feel so very privileged and blessed to be able to read. This book is the perfect mixture of whimsical and important. This book is about acceptance and love, and how we all are always on a search for it. And I hope you all pick this book up come January of 2018.This series means so much to me that I feel like I’m at a loss for words. I’ve never read anything like this before, and I can’t sing this series’ praises enough! I love this world, and I recommend these books with my whole heart. Thank you, Seanan McGuire, for writing a once in a lifetime series that means so much to so many! I will cherish this series for my entire life.And I can’t wait to see what’s next.“Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.”
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