Sequel to They Threw Us Away. Spoilers warning! The adventurous (against their will) teddies think they’ve found their desire: a home with a child who loves them. But all is not well. They have to be kept hidden from the mother. There’s conflict between the parents. The child doesn’t seem to love any one of them in particular, and they wonder if this is why the promised Forever Sleep still eludes them. They attempt to find ways to comfort her, be closer to her, but it doesn’t work. And when the mother finally discovers them, she reacts with such fear and disgust it seems there is something more going on. More than it just being about germs (because they were picked up off the roadside). The teddies find themselves in danger again and searching for more answers. They argue a lot. Buddy wants to find the Furrington factory. It seems hopeless. But they set out again, dodging scary things in the city. They encounter another group of teddy bears, all living in a basement in some strange encampment- and following strange, self-imposed rules. It almost felt like a cult. Very unsettling. Especially the self-harm aspect, and the rhetoric and the lack of interest those teddies had in anything our core group had to say. Buddy finds himself loosing his grip with the others- they can’t escape, they have to fit in, are some of them going to forget their purpose? The more Buddy figures out, the worse their situation appears to be.
Wow, this one didn’t hold back from the horror aspect. Some of it made me cringe and want to shut the book, and I’m not the target kid audience! There’s violence, dismemberment, self-denial and betrayals and a nasty encounter with a garbage disposal. There are more revelations about their history that make things seem bleak. A big part of the story is how this cozy little individual enterprise of one woman sewing special teddy bears and sharing them with others, got bought out by a huge corporation who turned it into an assembly line and used cheaper products. Far more about that in the volume to come, I’m guessing. Lots of questions still remain unanswered, and new ones have come up. Saddest of all is seeing Buddy struggle against the conformity pressure in the basement teddy society, teasing out how it all fits together, watching some of his friends succumb. Forcing a few answers out of the cult leader (who suddenly caves and gives in to him at the end, which I didn’t quite get). He looses one of his friends but gains another. And at the very end, they finally get into the factory, only to be stunned at what they find . . . leading of course, straight into the next book because you have to know what happens next!
Borrowed from the public library.
