Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) by Seanan McGuire. In Every Heart a Doorway, book #1 of the Wayward Children series, there's a series of murders. The first person to get murdered was a character I didn't like, so I thought that was really a rather convenient twist. Unfortunately this book was all about bringing her back to life.

The worlds the magic doorways open to all fall at points on a compass. Each direction is a classification of worlds: Logic and Nonsense are opposites, Wicked and Virtuous are opposites, and Rhyme and Reason are also opposites. This book was our first look at a Nonsense world, and it didn't work at all for me.

Being opposite of Logic, Nonsense throws out anything that makes sense. For example, you could walk anywhere in the entire world in a day of walking. The whole world was made of candy and cookies. I'd be a Logic or Reason door sort of person; even just spending a couple hours reading about a Nonsense world was too much for me.

Add onto that that I really didn't believe in the main character as a person. See, the theme of this series is "there's no one right way to be a girl", and each book has a different sort of girl as a main character. Intersex, damaged twin sister, missing a limb... The main character of this book was fat. The author only ever used "fat", never overweight, heavy, or any other word. The author also repeatedly said how in shape she was, despite being fat. How being fat wasn't her fault at all, she ate healthier than most other people. She was stronger than any of her friends, more in shape, more athletic, and being "fat" was a product of her genes and nothing else... Doesn't that rob the meaning of making the main character "fat"? Why couldn't she have been heavy because she likes pizza and cookies more than other people? Why did she have to have an excuse that it wasn't her "fault"? It just really struck me the wrong way.

This was the first book I didn't enjoy at all. I would have DNF'ed it, but it was so short and I had hoped it would get better.

In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4) by Seanan McGuire. While I didn't have any of the issues with #4 that I had had with #3, I still didn't enjoy it much.

It started out so slowly. We spent the first 20% of the book with the main character (a bookworm girl) in the real world. Snooze.

When she found her door and got to her new world (Goblin Market), it was... fine. For me, the world (and the story) had none of the magic of the other books.

I guess I believed the main character as a person (though a boring person). So much of the story was time-jumped past though, it was hard to connect with the world or any of the other characters.

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I loved books 1, 2, and 6 of this series so much, I was very surprised to see how much 3 and 4 didn't work for me.

Looks like I have two left of the series to go: Come Tumbling Down and Where the Drowned Girls Go.