Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire
175 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 6 to October 7
Rating: 3 out of 5
CN: weight image issues, mention of eating disorders.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. A sequel to McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, returning to the Home for Wayward Children in the aftermath of events I won't spoil from that book, Sugar Sky brought back Kade, one of my favorite minor characters in the series, and introduced Cora, who had the potential to be a new favorite. Cora is a fat and athletic teen girl, traumatized by incessant bullying and societal disdain, who had found her ideal world through a doorway, a world where she was a heroic mermaid, a skillful swimmer well-insulated against the chill of the ocean. She could have been a lovely milestone for representation of fat, heroic girls. But ironically, existing as one viewpoint character among several in a brief volume, her inner life is reduced and squeezed into two dimensions. Her mental monologue dwells on being fat, on bullying, on pressure to lose weight, on eating disorders (and how lucky she was to avoid them), and on her athleticism in the swimming pool. Her entire character, while heroic and capable, is largely defined by her fatness, her entire existence used as a didactic tool by the author.
As a fat athlete myself, I was pumped when she used her knowledge of how she was perceived by others to her advantage in order defeat an evil queen, yet I also felt a tingle of tokenism, that this character was only there to be a representative and to teach a social lesson. This impression spilled out onto the other characters, including Kade, a transboy largely defined by how he was kicked out of his ideal world after discovering that he wasn't a girl, or Christopher, a Latinx boy who found his home in a Day of the Dead-themed universe of skeleton people and sugar skulls. Social lessons and didacticism are an important aspect of fiction, especially fantasy directed at the younger set; I'd rather read these characters a thousand times over than even one more generic Straight White Male Savior narrative. But it opens up complicated questions of representation vs tokenism, and who has the right to tell other people's stories in the first place.
Anyone I'd want to spend any time around would feel that fiction needs better representation, and feel even more strongly that fiction needs a broader, more diverse array of contributors. The most radical assessment is that over-represented social categories (say, straight white dudes) should voluntarily stop seeking publication, permitting under-represented demographics the opportunity to finally have a louder voice in the crowded marketplace. It's the logical extension of the argument that "The best thing an ally can do is shut up and yield the floor." I have no logical counter-argument to this, other than a sense that excluding voices to prioritize others is how we got in this mess in the first place, and it doesn't sit right with me. (The fact that I'm white and have both straight-passing and cis-passing privilege certainly feeds into my gut feeling here; I've wanted to be a published author since I was a kid, and it would be inconvenient if my political outlook was the final obstacle that meant I never got a book in print.) Less radical ideas include doing your research, creating characters with a rich inner life that involves more than "Wow, I sure am a fat teen girl!", and having members of the relevant communities read your output before you call it a day (after being fairly compensated for their time and labor, of course).
Ironically, as someone who is neither a fat teen girl, nor a transboy from Oklahoma, nor a Mexican American boy with a magic flute given to him by the Skeleton Princess, I'm not in any position to judge whether McGuire did a good job at representing these demographics in her fiction. My feeling is that these books in the Wayward Children series are just too damn short to offer both didactic social commentary and fully realized characterizations. If Cora had been permitted to have more going on in her mind than "I'm a powerful athlete but I'm fat and people only ever see me as fat," I (as a fellow "fatty-fatty-fat-fat" person) would have been more satisfied with her. I can only imagine that people of Mexican ancestry, or transboys, would feel similarly about Christopher and Kade.
The brevity of the book also contributes to how undercooked it can seem. To hopelessly mix the metaphor, the authorial scaffolding is far too obvious; the main band of characters spend far too much time asking questions whose sole purpose is to let McGuire dole out some backstory or world-building. Brevity has been a frustration of mine since the beginning of the series. Every Heart a Doorway probably would have been one of my favorite fantasy novels of the last few years had it only been double the length, whereas Beneath the Sugar Sky could have used a few more drafts as well as some space to let its characters breathe and be more than the author's teachable moments.
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