Life at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is never quite ordinary, but it takes a strange turn even by its own standards when a girl plummets out of the sky and lands, with a splash, in the pond out back. Her name is Rini, she is bright and blunt and increasingly transparent, and she has come from Confection — a Nonsense world made of candy and baking and impossible logic — in search of her mother, Sumi.
The trouble is that Sumi died before Rini was ever conceived, which means Rini is slowly being erased by a Reality that has noticed she should not exist. To save her, a small crew of students — including the mermaid-hearted Cora and skeleton-loving Christopher — set out on a quest that will take them from the school to a land of the dead and on to Confection itself, to see whether a death can be undone and a daughter kept from vanishing.
The third Wayward Children novella turns from grief toward buoyant, bittersweet adventure — a story of friendship, baking, and derring-do that widens Seanan McGuire's cycle of doors and the children who long to return through them.