Published: 9 January 2018 (print)/9 January 2018 (audio) 
Publisher: tor.com/Macmillan Audio
Pages: 174/4 hrs and 11 mins
Narrator: Michelle Dockrey
Format: Audiobook
Genre: Fantasy
★ ★ ★ ★ – 4 Stars
When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest – not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can’t find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests…
A tale of friendship, baking, and derring-do. Warning: May contain nuts.
I love how we get introduced to characters in book one, and then as the series progresses we get their own individual stories, but scattered in between the original story arc keeps going as well. It is incredibly clever, and all the while revealing more about the rules of the worlds and the understanding of the system.
With the second book devoted to Jack and Jill’s story I was curious to see if the next book would pick another character we’d met and show their origins but I was delightfully surprised. We are back in the school as Rini literally lands at their door on a mission to save her mother, a character who died in book one.
This is why McGuire’s books are so fantastic, her rules on Logic and Nonsense, not to mention life and death are fascinating and primed for storytelling when put in the right hands. The nonsensical world works well with the nonsensical mission. Rini is as wild as her mother and the random nature of events only support the irregular world she’s come from.
I was delighted we got to revisit Nancy, especially in her own element, and it was great seeing characters deal with different land so unlike their own or their desired places. Given the world of Confection is a sugary light-hearted delight, there isn’t a lot of darkness or heavy themes, even with Rini’s possible demise. That isn’t to say there aren’t some wonderful things explored like understanding other people’s experiences and tolerance, but it is a much lighter story. Coming from Down Among the Sticks and Bones having something so sugary and nonsensical was probably the best call, and it is certainly a great reminder of the variety of doors and alignments people can be.
What makes these books so fantastic is they are relatively short reads but McGuire packs so much amazing story into so few pages. It’s truly a gift to be able have such real and complicated characters with such an involved plot and world while still keeping the page count short.
You can purchase Beneath the Sugar Sky via the following
Wordery | Blackwell’s | Angus & Robertson
Fishpond | Amazon | Amazon Aust | Audible
This new book is a clever way to introduce young readers to non-binary and gender-fluid people. As Ms. Reeves’ class produces a play about a farm, the entire class comes to understand about being true to who you are, as classmate Ari expresses their identity as they, which prompts Jacob to look more deeply about what it means to be who he is, and how others identify. Explaining the use of pronouns of one’s own choosing to kids, while all along reinforcing that an individual is much more layered and unique then how others may see him, her or them, is a developmentally important milestone to help foster respect of one’s self and one’s peers.
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The Big Cheese is the best at everything, and brags about it, too. When the annual Cheese-cathlon comes around, the Big Cheese is prepared to win, as always. But what happens when the quiet new kid, Wedge Wedgeman, comes out on top? Is a slice of humility all the Big Cheese needs to discover that some things are better than being the best? 
