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.