
Every Heart a Doorway
Audible Audiobook
– Unabridged
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$7.00
| $7.95 with discounted Audible membership |
Audio CD, CD, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
—
| — | — |
- Kindle
$0.00 Read with Kindle Unlimited to also enjoy access to over 1 million more titles $10.99 to buy -
Audiobook
$7.00 $7.00 with Audible Premium Plus to get this title - Hardcover
$10.69 - Audio CD
—
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children
No Solicitations
No Visitors
No Quests
Children have always disappeared under the right conditions - slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere...else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.
Nancy tumbled once, but now she's back. The things she's experienced...they change a person. The children under Miss West's care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world. But Nancy's arrival marks a change at the home. There's a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it's up to Nancy and her newfound schoolmates to get to the heart of things. No matter the cost.
- Listening Length4 hours and 44 minutes
- Audible release dateApril 5, 2016
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB0161YRCJU
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
Read & Listen
Switch back and forth between reading the Kindle book and listening to Audible audiobook.Add the audiobook for a reduced price of $7.49 after you get the Kindle book as part of your Kindle Unlimited subscription.
- One credit a month to pick any title from our entire premium selection to keep (you’ll use your first credit now).
- Unlimited listening on select audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts.
- Upgrade for just $7.00 for your first month. After that, Audible Premium Plus continues until cancelled at $14.95 per month. Cancel anytime

- One credit a month to pick any title from our entire premium selection to keep (you’ll use your first credit now).
- Unlimited listening on select audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts.
- You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
- $14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel online anytime.
People who viewed this also viewed
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
People who bought this also bought
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Related to this topic
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
- Audible Audiobook
Product details
Listening Length | 4 hours and 44 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Seanan McGuire |
Narrator | Cynthia Hopkins |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.com Release Date | April 05, 2016 |
Publisher | Macmillan Audio |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B0161YRCJU |
Best Sellers Rank | #24,915 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #161 in Fairy Tale Fantasy (Audible Books & Originals) #323 in Contemporary Fantasy #674 in Classic Literature (Audible Books & Originals) |
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Dear Miss McGuire take a bow because I think you might have outdone yourself.
This isn’t going to be for everyone. It is different, strange, fantastical, weird and utterly wickedly wonderful and then someone dies.
But before we get to that, imagine a world were the people who don’t quite fit into the norm sometimes disappear. ’That if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong”. Now imagine that sometimes for various reasons that door opens again and put them back into this world where they never felt they had a place in. This is a story about those kids. The ones that desperately want to go back to the world that was home and are just trying to learn how to cope in a world that never was. But they always have hope that they can find another door to take them home, all they have is hope.
“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world,” said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. “Hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast, if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying ‘don’t use this word’ and ‘don’t use that word,’ but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope.”
This was the strangest story I’ve read in awhile. It was so different from the book I read before it that I finished the first chapter and had no clue what I just read and had to go back and reread it to bring myself into the right mind frame. But once I immersed myself I was all in. I wanted to know so much more about Sumi and the crazy candyland like world she visited, or Nancy and her time with the Lord of the Dead and the Moors where Jack and Jill spent there time
“I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.”
We get little snippets here and there but I wanted to live in these other worlds too.
There is a bigger overall plot of murder as some of the travelers are being killed off for no apparent reason and none of the kids at the asylum/school are safe. All of the kids need to work together to try and figure out who is killing them off and why. But for me all of this was secondary to the overall weirdness of all of the characters.
Very rarely do I read a short story and think ‘I need this so be so much longer’. I wanted this to be a full novel I wanted so much more. I loved the strange interactions between all of the travelers and how I believed that none of them were supposed to be in this land. I was genuinely sad when the story over but I loved how it ended.
You’re nobody’s rainbow.
You’re nobody’s princess.
You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.
I truly believe that this is for anyone who has ever felt like maybe they just didn’t belong. I’m telling you right now that everyone feels that way at some point and you should read this because I’m 98% sure that you fit in way more than any of these kids ever did.
I really hope there are a dozen or more stories set in this world, because I really want to go through all of the doors and visit all of the crazy worlds Seanan McGuire can conjure in her head.
2 stars because the story was at least well written and something new. Not for me though, almost not at all.
It was fine, but just fine. A bit drawn and easy to guess the who and what of it all. This could have been a really magical story, with tons of different stories in it, and enormous worlds to explore and things to learn and enjoy.
Instead, this was a short story about someone who didn't like the way things were and then changed them. Everyone was depressing and non-relatable, except one and she was killed off at the start almost. Sumi was really the only interesting character, all others were just whiny children.
I'm really disappointed in this not being more grand. I don't mind the dark approach of it, but it wasn't made into anything. Just a bunch of kids that could've just as easily have been mentally challenged, than the worlds being real.
Recommended for:
Anyone looking for a short, easy read that doesn't require you getting into lots of details, but still looking for something new and different.
Not recommended for:
All of us looking for a grand adventure like The Hobbit or Harry Potter, or Narnia for that matter. Skip this if you want a large, grand world to explore, because you will be disappointed.
Top reviews from other countries

Miss Eleanor’s Home for children who have travelled through doorways into fantasy worlds should provide a retreat and a sanctuary for bruised and fragile psyches suffering from their (mostly unwilling) return to the ‘normal’ world. But it proves instead to be a very dangerous place indeed. Understand this: the doorways of which we speak do not open onto moral and uplifting otherworlds where children can be kings and queens and yet remain unspoiled. Some doorways lead to dark and dangerous places, and the children who return from them are marked in ways that are not always visible. This is the story of some of those returnees.
I have two caveats. The first is that with relatively little effort this could have been a full length novel. A broader picture of the residents of the home, and a little more detail on the individuals who appear (however briefly) would have added colour and depth, and the premise could easily have carried more detail. And, secondly, the ending left me desperately hoping that this would prove to be the beginning of a sequence. Dear reader, luckily it is. I’m off now to pre-order Down Among the Sticks and Bones.

Eleanor West runs a boarding schools for those children who can’t readjust. Their parents think them damaged, or wayward, or mad. Eleanor knows better, having herself returned from a Netherworld. Most learn to cope, in the company of those who understand. A few, a very few, find their way back. But when new girl Nancy arrives, dark things start happening, and the school itself is threatened. Is Nancy the source, or the trigger, of these events?
Life After Fantasy has always struck me as an issue. The scene at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the Pevensie children return home after decades in Narnia, always horrified me: they had been adult royalty; how did they cope with being ordinary children again? Jo Walton tackles this issue in her wonderful short story, "Relentlessly Mundane". Here Seanan McGuire tackles it differently, in a 170pp novella.
Despite wanting to go to Lewis’ Narnia (for the Talking Animals, if not for the sexism, racism, classism, bad theology, and shoddy plotting), and to Marjorie Phillips’ Fairyland, I didn’t find myself attracted to any of the Netherworlds described by McGuire. (And I don’t think that’s just because there are no Pauline Baynes illustrations, or that I am half a century older than when I read the originals.) However, that lack of attraction is not a problem: it just serves to illustrate how everyone is different, and what is hearts-ease for one may be horror for another. But, consistently, Mundania is home for none.
This is not a typical school story, as it does not dwell on any lessons, except for some interesting Netherworld classification schemes. Nancy as new girl allows for some expository passages, but not that many. The tale focuses mainly on the deadly goings-on that threaten the school. And even there, we do not get a lot, since this is a novella. But McGuire does paint vivid pictures of the various main characters, and the very different homes they wish to return to. I wish this was a novel rather than a novella, and you can’t say fairer than that.

The language is so beautiful and poetic and then it changes dramatically to swearing. I imagine if Irvine Welsh and Lewis Carroll had co written a book, the result would be very much like Every Heart... Wonderful, brutal, very much like The Moors. Can't wait to read book 2!

The content itself and the ideas on which the story is based are truly amazing. Authors’ imagination is to be respected and admired. I also liked her writing style.
Where I felt let down is that this is essentially just a short story and I didn’t think the storyline was properly developed. In the space of 170 pages we had the introduction, the plot (several of them actually), the characters and the ending which was quickly wrapped up. There wasn’t really much time to get to know the characters, let alone like them or pick your favourite. The ideas of the “other worlds” are fantastic but ultimately the shortness of the story let the book down for me.
The second book is based on Jack and Jill (characters from the first book) but since I don’t feel I connected to the characters I know I will not be purchasing the second book.
I liked the book but didn’t love it. I expected to be pulled into the magical world of impossible things and instead I felt I only took a fast train ride through some scenic parts. And the train was travelling really fast! I would have expected to pay £5 for this.
If you like fantasy series, try Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy.
