I had a hard time deciding my Valentine’s Day reading this year: either start C.L. Polk’s new book which actually is a romance (among other things) or continue the Wayward Children series. I went with continue the current series because I wanted to know what happens next.
Beneath the Sugar Sky picks up where the first book leaves off, at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, apparently not too long after the events of the first book. Several key characters are still there including Kade and Christopher. The basic plot is that two new characters, Cora and Nadya, are by a pond when another girl falls naked out of the sky into the pond and demands to know where her mother, Onishi Sumi, is. The problem is that Sumi died in a previous volume of the story. Apparently this was not how her life was supposed to go; Sumi was supposed to live, go back to her nonsense world of Confection, defeat an evil queen, and eventually settle down with a candy corn farmer and have Rini (the girl from the pond). Rini needs to find her mother and bring her back because, in addition to the problems developing in Confection, Rini herself is starting to disappear, piece by piece. So off everyone goes, first to find Sumi’s skeleton, then her soul, and finally her spirit. Along the way, we do get to see Nancy in her World of the Dead again, which I was hoping for, although I don’t quite see how or why Nancy felt so at home there, not that it seems harsh, but still…. {pun intended}
Confection is like a really messed up version of Candyland the game. The evil queen is trying to take over (again?) and the world doesn’t like it, which causes some “reality” problems, and then here’s the race to get the parts of Sumi to the Baker, who is apparently the “god” of the world, although the individual is occasionally replaced by another Baker. I know the world is supposed to not make sense, but I’d still have liked some more detail or world building since the location is so much a part of Sumi, and it’s the setting for most of the action of the second half of the story. Even the Baker doesn’t seem to really understand, but then maybe not caring how or why it works is the point? I would not do well in a place like that, that’s for sure.
While I was less satisfied by this installment than some of the others, I do still appreciate the sort of bittersweet endings as well as the still open-ended nature of the story of which I know there are 2 more volumes which I now need to find.
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