"We’re teenagers in a magical land following a dead girl and a disappearing girl into a field of organic, pesticide-free candy corn," said Kade. "I think weird is a totally reasonable response to the situation." [loc. 1377]
Another novella: I read this as part of the Hugo shortlist pack. The premise of the 'Wayward Children' series is nice: the framing narrative is Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school for children who've visited a fantasy world and returned, whose parents have sent them away 'for slaying dragons and refusing to say that they hadn’t'. In this volume, Rini arrives abruptly at the School, and discovers that her mother is dead -- indeed, that her mother died long before Rini was even conceived. In order to stay real, Rini and her new friends have to travel to different lands, including a Hadean Underworld and Rini's home, the land of Confection.
I hadn't read the first two novellas in the series: I might have got along better if I had. But I didn't like Beneath the Sugar Sky for several reasons. The most trivial, but the most immediate, was that I found it literally nauseating: Confection is a world which is made of sweets, rather like a three-dimensional cross between Candy Crush and Alice in Wonderland. I don't have much of a sweet tooth (good chocolate excepted), and McGuire's vivid descriptions made me queasy. (Or queasier, given that I read it on an extremely hot and humid day.)
The second issue may be more general: the novella felt as though it was ticking the diversity boxes. One of the protagonists, Cora, is fat ('and athletic!' she would no doubt interject), and has been bullied and shamed all her life -- except in the fantasy realm she visited, where she became a mermaid. There's a trans character pushing back against the parents who insist that he's a girl; a Hispanic boy who's been othered and harassed; a girl born without a right hand, who's pitied and treated as a cripple. Yes, the moral of the story is all about not being defined by others' perceptions, and pushing back against assumptions (this is, indeed, the method by which victory's achieved) but at times the characters -- especially Cora -- felt one-dimensional, prone to framing everything in terms of their particular issue.
I don't think Beneath the Sugar Sky is a bad book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the other works by McGuire that I've read. I'm tempted to try one of the others in the sequence, if they become available on Kindle at a more reasonable price. (Over £8 for a novella? Nope!)
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