This one is special. This one is really special. It’s been on my mind since I read it a while back, and honestly? I can’t stop shouting about it. With a second tale in the Wayward Children universe about to hit the bookstores, this is the perfect moment to catch up on this fantastic award-winning novella by Seanan McGuire.
So, what’s so great about Every Heart a Doorway? To start with, the premise is fabulous (especially for those of us who grew up reading Narnia, and Alice in Wonderland, and all the other portal fantasies out there): what happens to the children who find the gateways from our world into other places when their part in the story is over? When the book ends, and these children go tumbling back to their own world, what then?
That not all these world-hopping travellers would be happy to return makes a lot of sense. That many of them might feel lost, estranged in the world they were born to, their stories dismissed as flights of fancy or hallucinations of a troubled mind, is a leap of logic. For the lucky ones among them, this might mean an invitation to study at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children – outwardly a school dedicated to rehabilitating troubled teens, but in fact a safe haven for travellers like Miss West herself, who long for nothing more than to return to the strange lands they journeyed to.
New girl Nancy is one of these children who have returned. She’s not happy about it, but at least in Eleanor West’s school she’s surrounded by others who understand her yearning for the magical land she lost. But when tragedy strikes shortly after Nancy’s arrival, she and her fellow students have to face the length and depth a person would go to in order to get to their deepest desire.
Every Heart a Doorway is a beautifully layered tale. We have, at surface level, a murder mystery set in a school. We have Nancy’s story, of trying and failing to fit in. And then we have wider ripples that touch many of her fellow students: the struggle to hold onto a newly acquired identity that does not match the neat little box that family and society has attempted to fit them into.
This is the heart of the novella – identity. Finding out who you truly are, despite what those you grew up with might say, and learning to reshape yourself and the world around you to fit this new identity, even if those who are supposed to love you best refuse to accept it. The child who would rather be a scientist than a princess; the assexual child who keeps getting pressured to date; the child who refuses the serious, responsible role she’s given; the transgender child. All those who keep getting forced into the wrong skin, so to speak, until they travel to a different world and have a chance to find out who they really want to be.
This is a truly lovely story of discovery, and refusal to submit, and the search for acceptance. It’s dark and unsettling at times, but that’s as should be, and it’s definitely going on my list of favorites. I can’t wait for the next book, Down Among the Sticks and Bones!
Down Among the Sticks and Bones will be released by Tor.com on June 13th, 2017.
Juliana Spink Mills 