The one that doesn't feel like a sequel to me is Down Among the Sticks and Bones, which tells the backstory of Jack and Jill, the two sisters who are more or less the antagonists of Every Heart a Doorway. Right off the bat there were a number of things I didn't like about it. I don't care for stories about deliberately unpleasant people, and the entire first section of Sticks and Bones is about Jack and Jill's parents, self-centered social climbers who decide to have children as a status symbol and then spend over a decade alternately neglecting and manipulating them. I don't like stories that spend a lot of time repeating information, and going into Sticks and Bones, I already knew ninety percent of Jack and Jill's backstory. I'm not a Gothic horror fan either, and Jack and Jill's door takes them to the Moors, which is made up of distilled horror tropes a la Barovia from Dungeons and Dragons or Innistrad from Magic: the Gathering.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones is still very good. The story of Jack and Jill finding their way to the Moors and making parallel lives there is beautifully written. Jack's relationship with the village innkeeper's daughter, as well as with her mad-scientist father figure Dr. Bleak, are significant, relatable, and extremely sweet. And in the end, we understand exactly why Jill is ready to commit murder in order to return to the Moors, and exactly why that's such a bad idea. But the book just felt unnecessary to me, since the whole point of Every Heart a Doorway was that it was about what happened after. I preferred to let the particulars of the characters' home worlds be Noodle Incidents, explained only as much as necessary to explain who they were and what they wanted. Sticks and Bones felt like the kind of story to which Doorway is a response.
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Beneath the Sugar Sky felt like a much more appropriate follow-up to the Doorway story. It's about Kade, Christopher, and Nadya from Doorway, plus new student Cora, whose door made her a mermaid, dealing with the repercussions of Jill's killing spree. Specifically, that Jill's first victim, Sumi, was supposed to grow up, return to the nonsensical world of Confection, and have a daughter, and now that daughter has shown up at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children demanding that the timeline be set right. So they set out on a quest to resurrect Sumi, defeat the evil Queen of Cakes who tyrannized Confection in Sumi's absence, and make her daughter not disappear forever.
This was such a beautiful story. Not just in its settings, though it captures the austerity of the Halls of the Dead just as vividly as the chaos of Confection. It's also good to its characters. Not only does Nancy, who returned to the Halls of the Dead at the end of Doorway, show up to help with the quest, but Cora's narration was particularly resonant. She'd been mocked all her life for being fat, so much so that it crushed her passion for swimming and drove her to attempt suicide. Instead of dying, she is transported to the Trenches, a deep-sea environment for which her body is perfectly suited, where she performs wonderful feats of depth-defying heroism as a mermaid. (I take full responsibility for that pun.) She has all my sympathies, as someone who struggles with whether or not I should be worried about my weight.
Ironically, it was Sugar Sky that made me want more of the Sticks and Bones-type stories as a spinoff. I want to know more about Cora's adventures especially, but I'm also curious about Nadya's turtle friends and Kade's time in the Goblin Market (fortunately, the next book, In an Absent Dream, is advertised as being about someone who goes to the Goblin Market). Maybe what I didn't like about Sticks and Bones was that it was about Jack and Jill specifically. Don't let that stop you from reading it.
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