Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

by Seanan McGuire

Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible.

Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew.

It was gross, the number of people at my old school who thought it was funny to call me an anchor baby, or to ask, all fake concerned, if my parents were legal. It got to where I didn’t want to say ‘Mexican,’ because it sounded like an insult in their mouths when it was really my culture, and my heritage, and my family. So I get it. I don’t like it, but that’s not your fault.”

it’s considered a little rude to run around showing your genitals to people who haven’t asked,”

the idea of subtlety was ignored in favor of the much more entertaining idea of hurting people’s eyes.

“I’m not stupid, I just don’t know stuff,”

“Everybody’s a skeleton someday. You die, and the soft parts drop away, and what’s left behind is all beautiful bone.

She was a solid, practical person, and while she had accepted the existence of magic—sort of hard not to, under the circumstances—there was a lot of ground between “magic is real, other worlds are real, mermaids can be real, in a world that wants them” and “everything is real, women fall out of the sky into turtle ponds, skeletons walk, and we left my best friend in the underworld.”