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Beneath the Sugar Sky Wayward Children Seanan McGuire 9780765393586 Books

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Beneath the Sugar Sky Wayward Children Seanan McGuire 9780765393586 Books

You may know Susan Cooper as the author of the Dark is Rising series. A good series, in its own way. Classic fantasy. I remember her more for a duo of undeniably odd books about two Canadian children who inherit a boggart from their Scottish grandfather.

Susan Cooper's boggart was not the boggart you may be used to. Not the wicked spirit void of personality in the Harry Potter Books that mindlessly molds itself to its opponent's (victim's?) worst fear. Susan Cooper's boggart was magical, in the best, most wondrous sense of the word. He was fiercely loyal while also being Not Human in a pleasantly spine chilling sense of the Other. He also loved peanut butter.

At eight years old, I was so entirely enchanted by the boggart that I began leaving spoonfuls of peanut butter around the house and literally could not get out of bed one day, the heartbreak of realizing the peanut butter would never be gone when I snuck back to check on it was so strong.

This post isn't about Susan Cooper.

This post is about Seanan McGuire and her Wayward Children series. If you're unfamiliar, the basic premise is that the stories follow the psychological trauma of children who return from portal fantasy adventures, the children who never quite fit in at "home," and who were granted the grace of an impossible doorway to another world. Children who by misadventure or malice lost that doorway and now wait desperately for one more, please gods, just one more chance to be where they're supposed to be.

The interesting thing about this series is that in each book there are several main characters into whose minds the narrative dips, and while they're each well developed and have their own arcs, motivations, and reactions, the reader is never allowed to linger, or delve too deeply. While this isn't normally the structure I prefer in stories, the reason it works so brilliantly, so achingly, in this instance, is that each lost child-hero is a stand in for every reader who left peanut butter out for their own personal boggart.

What this narrative structure does, with less focus on characters than conventional writing wisdom requires, is that it leaves room for concepts. Such sweeping, elegant, ridiculous, seemingly unworkable concepts, that each world, even when spared a mere sentence of description, leaves me with such a familiar ache of homesickness and longing that it's hard to breathe.

(Another thing that's really, really great about, well, all of McGuire's writing really, is that it's remarkably, matter-of-factly, inclusive. She doesn't go out of her way to include characters of color or of LGBTQIA identities because she's created worlds, much like the real one, that are full of them.)

I don't think you understand, as much as I've tried to explain it, what reading these books are like unless you have a boggart. As I write, I'm about 78% through the third and latest book, Beneath a Sugar Sky and my chest is already tightening in wincing anticipation of being cast out of this bookworld, that's felt like my own doorway since I read the first chapter of the first book.

So while this series is indeed a princessly gift, it does come with the possibility of thorns.


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Beneath the Sugar Sky Wayward Children Seanan McGuire 9780765393586 Books Reviews

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.
You may know Susan Cooper as the author of the Dark is Rising series. A good series, in its own way. Classic fantasy. I remember her more for a duo of undeniably odd books about two Canadian children who inherit a boggart from their Scottish grandfather.

Susan Cooper's boggart was not the boggart you may be used to. Not the wicked spirit void of personality in the Harry Potter Books that mindlessly molds itself to its opponent's (victim's?) worst fear. Susan Cooper's boggart was magical, in the best, most wondrous sense of the word. He was fiercely loyal while also being Not Human in a pleasantly spine chilling sense of the Other. He also loved peanut butter.

At eight years old, I was so entirely enchanted by the boggart that I began leaving spoonfuls of peanut butter around the house and literally could not get out of bed one day, the heartbreak of realizing the peanut butter would never be gone when I snuck back to check on it was so strong.

This post isn't about Susan Cooper.

This post is about Seanan McGuire and her Wayward Children series. If you're unfamiliar, the basic premise is that the stories follow the psychological trauma of children who return from portal fantasy adventures, the children who never quite fit in at "home," and who were granted the grace of an impossible doorway to another world. Children who by misadventure or malice lost that doorway and now wait desperately for one more, please gods, just one more chance to be where they're supposed to be.

The interesting thing about this series is that in each book there are several main characters into whose minds the narrative dips, and while they're each well developed and have their own arcs, motivations, and reactions, the reader is never allowed to linger, or delve too deeply. While this isn't normally the structure I prefer in stories, the reason it works so brilliantly, so achingly, in this instance, is that each lost child-hero is a stand in for every reader who left peanut butter out for their own personal boggart.

What this narrative structure does, with less focus on characters than conventional writing wisdom requires, is that it leaves room for concepts. Such sweeping, elegant, ridiculous, seemingly unworkable concepts, that each world, even when spared a mere sentence of description, leaves me with such a familiar ache of homesickness and longing that it's hard to breathe.

(Another thing that's really, really great about, well, all of McGuire's writing really, is that it's remarkably, matter-of-factly, inclusive. She doesn't go out of her way to include characters of color or of LGBTQIA identities because she's created worlds, much like the real one, that are full of them.)

I don't think you understand, as much as I've tried to explain it, what reading these books are like unless you have a boggart. As I write, I'm about 78% through the third and latest book, Beneath a Sugar Sky and my chest is already tightening in wincing anticipation of being cast out of this bookworld, that's felt like my own doorway since I read the first chapter of the first book.

So while this series is indeed a princessly gift, it does come with the possibility of thorns.