Ahhh, Wednesdays. Otherwise known as the gateway to the weekend. Yes, I know I still have two working days. Don’t rain on my parade here. I’m trying to talk myself into the fact that I only have two more days until the weekend.
Anyway, today was a good day book wise. I read Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire. Its the third book in the Wayward Children series and I’m in love. If you haven’t read this series yet, you need to. It really is great. There is action, adventure, and while the books are a little bit sad in that the children are searching for a home, its still heartwarming.
Like I said, this is the third book of the series. I wouldn’t recommend trying to read this one before the others but you could do it if you had to. The book focuses around returning characters such as Christopher and Kade but also adds new people like Cora and Nadja. If you don’t know the series, it focuses on children who are a little different. They have all experienced other worlds by going thru a door. Some go to fairy lands, other go to Logic lands, where everything makes sense, and some go to worlds where they fall in love with skeleton princesses. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which character is which and which one mostly relates to you.
Cora is the one I loved the most. She was me, twenty years ago. Cora and I share the same body type. We both have dealt with body image problems and while I’ve learned after 36 years to live with the body given, Cora is still in that teenage phase where other people’s opinion actually mean something to her.
Cora had been fat her entire life. She had been a fat baby, and a fat toddler in swim classes, and a fat child in elementary school. Day after day, she had learned that “fat” was another way to say “worthless, ugly, waste of space, unwanted, disgusting”. She had learned to believe them by the time she was in the third grade, because what else was she supposed to do?
Cora came to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children by way of the Trenches. She went to the Trenches where she became a mermaid who helped save the land. However, she was pushed back out the world by a random tide. When she wouldn’t stop telling the story of her time way, they packed her off to the home. She is only there a few months when a young naked girl tumbles out the sky, pulling the kids on a quest to save another world.
I love these books. They are never long enough in my humble opinion. I want more from each world, where I get sucked into a fairy tale land where it might not be perfect but its perfect for them. And I would have loved to have these books when I was younger, dreaming of a worlds that would take me from the one I lived in where I felt like an outsider no matter what I did. Ms. McGuire proves once again she is the queen of fairytales with this addition.
5 out of 5 stars.
Anne Read’s and Reviews 