Every Heart a Doorway

If you don't mind the formulas of fantasy writing, then stop reading this review and read the book. You'll love it. There's a very interesting protagonist and a strong ending.

In the early chapters, there were two fantasy-style formulasat play: excessive descriptions and the use of phrases like "seemed like" or "it was as if..." If these writing devices are used before the characters are establishes, it pulls me out of the story. Because I'm asking, "Who sees the world this way?" or "Seemed like to whom?" Without a narrator character or a POV, then the devices fall flat to me.

Okay, rant done. The book was saved by a protagonist that has a very interesting motivation and way of seeing things. Plus the ending is very satisfying. I'll rate this as 3/5 and check out the next book in the series. Maybe I'll lift to 4 if the series continues well. I'm interested in the characters enough to overlook the rant.

Edit: The next book, Down Among the Sticks and Bones is really fun. It focuses on one set of characters from this book, making it like a prologue. I'll keep reading the series.

This is quite a short book, a quick one-sitting read for an adult, but really more of a YA book although with "mature" themes so I'd say teenagers rather than tweens (nothing too racy, but there are dismembered bodies, and vibrator/masturbation jokes).

It's about a boarding school for oddball children - not an unusual premise for a YA book - but in this particular case, the children are those who had been "lost" in various fairylands/alternate worlds, and have now returned to this one and cannot readjust. These are the children who went Through the Looking Glass to Wonderland, or through the wardrobe to Narnia, and so on, and then came back, having lived years in those other worlds, often to find themselves back in young bodies they no longer feel attached to, and with parents who still expect a different person than the one they are now. So the parents take them to board at this school, and the lady who runs the school tries to help them readjust, and come to terms with their loss (because it's a loss to all of the kids who come here - they all want to go back, and for various reasons, cannot get back).

It's an interesting premise which isn't too unusual on the face of it, but McGuire creates a framework of structure by defining the different types of world (Nonsense worlds and Logic worlds and Wicked worlds and Virtue worlds and variants of each), and also by postulating that the doors appear to the children in the first place to take them into these worlds because of some element that the child needs. A deeply suppressed, quiet child goes to a nonsense world where she can discover and finally express her exuberance for life. An unhappy girl goes to a Logic world where she discovers she is really a he inside - and then is sent to the school by parents who cannot accept this. And so on. It's not really a great leap but codified neatly into a system of alternate worlds that's tied together through this school for wayward children.

And when students start turning up dead shortly after the newest girl Nancy arrives at the school, not only are all the students' lives in danger but so is the future of the school, if word gets out and parents force the school to shut down.

I liked this a good deal more than McGuire's badass-snarky-urban-heroine-in-high-heels books and might consider picking up some of the sequels.

I have one complaint about this book, and perhaps it’s unfair to start a review that way, but here it is: I wish this book had been twice as long as it was. I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time in this world. Good thing this book is the first of an ongoing series.

This book/series shouldn’t necessarily work. It’s based on a trope that seems so well trod at this point, finding a fresh angle is no mean feat. But Seanan McGuire has done it. She took the idea of a special school for special kids (right? how many of those are there at this point?) and did something wonderfully new with it. What if, instead of schools for witches and wizards, for magicians of various sorts, there was a school for kids who, at some point in their childhoods, vanished through magical doorways. You know the sort, they’re in wardrobes and deep patches of shadow. They’re behind an old appliance in the garage or inside a box in the basement. They’re under the bed or inside just the right gnarled tree. These doorways are everywhere and only just the right children are able to access them, upon which they suddenly find themselves in truly fantastic new worlds.

But here’s the thing, sometimes those kids end up back here – by choice, by force, or by accident – and their experiences in those magical lands have forever altered them, so they don’t fit here anymore – if they ever did. Thank goodness one of those children grew up and founded a school where they can be among the only people who understand what they’ve been through and who also long to rediscover their own magical portals elsewhere – people just like them. Now, having said all that, this concept could still end up feeling trite, but I love how McGuire conceived of such a broad range of possible worlds. There even exists a taxonomy for them that reminds me of D&D character alignment.

This book also does a beautiful job of sharing expressions of queerness in a refreshingly normalizing manner, featuring characters who are asexual, trans, and other queer identities without tokenizing anyone. Even masturbation is normalized, which might seem like an odd thing to mention in a book review, but I was so impressed to encounter mention of self-pleasuring that was meant as neither titillation, joke, or taboo.

TL;DR: It’s not often that I find a new fantasy series that I want to sink my teeth into, but this is one of them. Thank goodness the door to that world is so easy to find.