“Nobody promised me a happy ending. They didn’t even promise me a happy existence.”
This volume takes place chronologically shortly after Book One. One day at Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children, a girl named Rini falls out of the sky and into the turtle pond. She claims she came from Confection, a Nonsense world where her mother was in charge. She came back to our Earth to save her mother, a teenage student at the school. The problem is that her mother died in the middle of Book One before Rini was born, so Rini is slowly being unmade, Back to the Future style. And so the quest begins to bring back her mother from the dead, defeat the evil Queen of Cakes, and restore her mother to power.
I am just absolutely in love with the Wayward Children series, particularly Seanan McGuire’s writing. I mean:
“Everyone who would up at Eleanor West’s School – everyone who found a door – understood what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for something that other people wouldn’t necessarily understand. Not because they were better than other people and not because they were worse, but because they had a need trapped somewhere in their bones, gnawing constantly, trying to get out.”
The whole damn book is written like that. These little novelas are absolute treasures. I refuse to binge-read the series, because I just want to savor each volume. I read one in between every two or three books, and they make a perfect palette cleanser, and a wonderful escape through a door of my own.