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The Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

Each generation, a competition is held to find the next empress of Honoku. The rules are simple. Survive the palace's enchanted seasonal rooms. Conquer Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Marry the prince. All are eligible to compete--all except yokai, supernatural monsters and spirits whom the human emperor is determined to enslave and destroy. Mari has spent a lifetime training to become empress. Winning should be easy. And it would be, if she weren't hiding a dangerous secret. Mari is a yokai with the ability to transform into a terrifying monster. If discovered, her life will be forfeit. As she struggles to keep her true identity hidden, Mari's fate collides with that of Taro, the prince who has no desire to inherit the imperial throne, and Akira, a half-human, half-yokai outcast. Torn between duty and love, loyalty and betrayal, vengeance and forgiveness, the choices of Mari, Taro, and Akira will decide the fate of Honoku in this beautifully written, edge-of-your-seat YA...
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Beneath The Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children, #3)

Beneath the Sugar Sky attempts to fix something broken before it loses all possibility of ever being right again. There's a sense of urgency defined by absence rather than presence; tension created by what ought to be but is not.

The world-building is fantastic, both for the specific places they visit and for what those places say about the multiverse as a whole. It moves along with the best answers we have for now and then tells the reader new answers as the characters discover them. It made it feel like discovering something wonderful along with people who know enough to be guides while still having a sense of awe at every new thing.

This returns to the setting of the first book to advance what looks like it will be the main narrative of the series, tracing the lives of the children at the school during their tenure (while the even numbered books tell more about people during the time they did not reside there). I knew a little of that structure but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of settings in this one. The school is a locus but it doesn't constrain the story at all, getting out of the way so that we could have a quest this time. I like seeing different sides of old characters and meeting some brand new ones.

CW for (internalized) fatphobia and references to dieting.

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Purple clouds in a blue sky over a pink soda sea with a slightly open door hovering in the middle

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