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A review by bookph1le
Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire
3.0
3.5 stars
This rating is kind of tricky for me. I adore this series and cannot overstate how important I think it is. Unlike most YA, this series and author do not feel the need to stick to the tropes that define the genre, and I find that *super* refreshing. As someone who has mostly stopped reading YA sci-fi because I get so tired of seeing the same tropes repeated over and over, it's a delight to find a series that isn't at all concerned with sticking to genre conventions.
Now, my problems with this book stem from something I'm starting to notice about McGuire's books, now that I've read a fair number of them, including one of her non-Wayward books: sometimes her plots are lacking. This book didn't work for me because the plot itself felt too paint-by-numbers. It was a typical hero's journey kind of plot, and I felt like the story was checking off items on an outline as it went. I didn't find Cora's, Kade's, Nadya's, Christopher's, and Rini's efforts to restore balance to Confection particularly compelling. It was as if the characters had a to-do list and each time they completed one chore they moved along to the next.
However, McGuire's imagination is truly prodigious and breathtaking, and I was just awed throughout so many passages in this book. Reading about Confection is pretty delightful, and McGuire describes it in such a compelling way. Yet I felt that this was part of the problem with this particular novella. It was as if McGuire had this gorgeous, creative, just out there world she wanted to play around in but didn't particularly want to worry about the plot. This is where I find some weakness with her works. To me, she's at her best when she's focused on the personal, such as in the superb second installment in this series, which is really all about the bonds between sisters and how those bonds can become twisted. When McGuire's books move into the "big" plots, they tend to fall apart for me.
And that's a shame, because the fat girl representation here was nothing short of marvelous and much-needed. Had the entire story focused on this aspect of things, I would have been sold. Indeed, I thought this novella was strongest when it was deconstructing the discrimination and judgement with which Cora has had to cope her entire life. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand why these wayward children want back into their odd and dangerous worlds, but it wasn't hard for me to understand why Cora wanted to go back. Instead of being judged solely on what her body looks like, she found a world that valued her for who she is and what she can do. I don't see how any fat person can't appreciate that notion--or even how most women, thin or fat, could fail to appreciate it. The book is a searing indictment of how horribly Cora is treated by a society that doesn't care about truly understanding fatness because it's too busy blaming fat people for all its problems. I was thrilled when it felt like Cora was going to be the hero of this story *because* of her fatness but didn't entirely believe the book let her live up to that potential, which was a shame. Still, I was happier than I can say that Cora's weight was never a problem or an impediment to her in the story. I also really, really liked that McGuire took aim at the idea of weight loss as a magical solution to all life's problems. She's not peddling faux body positivity here, she's methodically deconstructing everything that's wrong with the way society thinks about fat people, our cult of weight loss worshiping, and the fundamental misunderstandings about the effects of fatness on health.
I will never stop lauding McGuire for her book's representation. The Wayward series may seem like the poster child for inclusiveness, but her Into the Drowning Deep has every bit as much representation as this series. McGuire gets that people are people, that no matter what race they are, no matter which gender they identify with, no matter their sexual preference, people are human beings. That humanity is so baked into her writing, and even when she's writing about characters who are ostensibly evil, her work is empathetic. The Queen of Cakes is the villain here, but is she? Isn't she a product of her environment? At what point do we have to absolve people of some of the responsibility for what they do because they're products of their environments? McGuire isn't interested in easy or pat answers to those questions and neither am I.
So, yeah, this book was a bit of a letdown to me, especially because I found Down Among the Sticks and Bones to be such an astonishing moving and gorgeous work. But I won't quit reading McGuire and, indeed, am looking very forward to the fourth book in this series, precisely because she's an author who refuses to populate her books with stock characters and who insists on portraying everything in shades of gray. If her plots always meshed with her prodigious abilities at characterization and exploring the larger implications of societal issues, she'd be about as perfect as an author can be.
This rating is kind of tricky for me. I adore this series and cannot overstate how important I think it is. Unlike most YA, this series and author do not feel the need to stick to the tropes that define the genre, and I find that *super* refreshing. As someone who has mostly stopped reading YA sci-fi because I get so tired of seeing the same tropes repeated over and over, it's a delight to find a series that isn't at all concerned with sticking to genre conventions.
Now, my problems with this book stem from something I'm starting to notice about McGuire's books, now that I've read a fair number of them, including one of her non-Wayward books: sometimes her plots are lacking. This book didn't work for me because the plot itself felt too paint-by-numbers. It was a typical hero's journey kind of plot, and I felt like the story was checking off items on an outline as it went. I didn't find Cora's, Kade's, Nadya's, Christopher's, and Rini's efforts to restore balance to Confection particularly compelling. It was as if the characters had a to-do list and each time they completed one chore they moved along to the next.
However, McGuire's imagination is truly prodigious and breathtaking, and I was just awed throughout so many passages in this book. Reading about Confection is pretty delightful, and McGuire describes it in such a compelling way. Yet I felt that this was part of the problem with this particular novella. It was as if McGuire had this gorgeous, creative, just out there world she wanted to play around in but didn't particularly want to worry about the plot. This is where I find some weakness with her works. To me, she's at her best when she's focused on the personal, such as in the superb second installment in this series, which is really all about the bonds between sisters and how those bonds can become twisted. When McGuire's books move into the "big" plots, they tend to fall apart for me.
And that's a shame, because the fat girl representation here was nothing short of marvelous and much-needed. Had the entire story focused on this aspect of things, I would have been sold. Indeed, I thought this novella was strongest when it was deconstructing the discrimination and judgement with which Cora has had to cope her entire life. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand why these wayward children want back into their odd and dangerous worlds, but it wasn't hard for me to understand why Cora wanted to go back. Instead of being judged solely on what her body looks like, she found a world that valued her for who she is and what she can do. I don't see how any fat person can't appreciate that notion--or even how most women, thin or fat, could fail to appreciate it. The book is a searing indictment of how horribly Cora is treated by a society that doesn't care about truly understanding fatness because it's too busy blaming fat people for all its problems. I was thrilled when it felt like Cora was going to be the hero of this story *because* of her fatness but didn't entirely believe the book let her live up to that potential, which was a shame. Still, I was happier than I can say that Cora's weight was never a problem or an impediment to her in the story. I also really, really liked that McGuire took aim at the idea of weight loss as a magical solution to all life's problems. She's not peddling faux body positivity here, she's methodically deconstructing everything that's wrong with the way society thinks about fat people, our cult of weight loss worshiping, and the fundamental misunderstandings about the effects of fatness on health.
I will never stop lauding McGuire for her book's representation. The Wayward series may seem like the poster child for inclusiveness, but her Into the Drowning Deep has every bit as much representation as this series. McGuire gets that people are people, that no matter what race they are, no matter which gender they identify with, no matter their sexual preference, people are human beings. That humanity is so baked into her writing, and even when she's writing about characters who are ostensibly evil, her work is empathetic. The Queen of Cakes is the villain here, but is she? Isn't she a product of her environment? At what point do we have to absolve people of some of the responsibility for what they do because they're products of their environments? McGuire isn't interested in easy or pat answers to those questions and neither am I.
So, yeah, this book was a bit of a letdown to me, especially because I found Down Among the Sticks and Bones to be such an astonishing moving and gorgeous work. But I won't quit reading McGuire and, indeed, am looking very forward to the fourth book in this series, precisely because she's an author who refuses to populate her books with stock characters and who insists on portraying everything in shades of gray. If her plots always meshed with her prodigious abilities at characterization and exploring the larger implications of societal issues, she'd be about as perfect as an author can be.