*** “She was a story, not an epilogue.” ***
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.
Every Heart a Doorway
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Customer reviews
If there is any book recommendation you take from knowing me or from reading my blog, please let it be this book & this series as a whole. I can’t fully express what it means to me, but I am damn sure going to try for the sake of this review! Every Heart a Doorway is the first book in the Wayward Children series, which currently consists of 5 books (but has recently announced a 6th!). It’s hard to categorize these books by genre, so I won’t. I will say that you should read them, whether you’re a fan of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, or something else – they’re incredible.We’re all familiar with ‘portal worlds’, right? Think Narnia or Alice in Wonderland – places that are accessible only via a specific portal that opens and allows the protagonist to travel through it. Now imagine our real world existing alongside these portal worlds, where children are often lost to them to live out grand adventures and risk everything. And then imagine our real world, where some of these children come back. In the same way that the horror genre’s beloved final girls are changed irrevocably by their experiences, so too are the children coming back from these worlds. For some, who had found places they belonged for the first time in their lives through these travels, the return can be an extremely unpleasant experience.Enter Miss Eleanor West, and her school for these Wayward children. Offering a safe place where their travels are discussed via group therapy sessions rather than the homes where they’ve been met with disbelief and disapproving looks, many of these children find solace here, and are given space to readjust after their adventures in these other places. But what happens when that safe haven is threatened?This book technically qualifies as a novella, as does every other book in the series. While short, the books are incredibly thought provoking, offering some really pristine moments of wisdom that are applicable both in these fantastic stories, as well as in our real life society today.One of my favorite parts about these books is the incredibly diverse representation that we see in the characters. One of the main themes of the series is individuality, and the understanding that sometimes the roles you’re born into or that are expected from you, aren’t the roles where you’re going to thrive. The children in Eleanor’s home all found other worlds where they grew as people, and sometimes even lived full lives – even if just a matter of months had passed in the real world. Where these kids struggled under societal pressures and obligations in the real world, they found freedom and truth in their portal lands – and, like with people in our society, our personal truths are specific to each of us.I don’t want to spoil too much, but I believe it’s important to convey how extensive the representation here is. There is incredible diversity in the sexualities, the races, and the genders of all of our characters, which is such a pleasure to read – it’s much more like the real world than some extremely white-focused books that feel more like a Sweet Valley High rerun than a believable story.Our main protagonist is an asexual girl who struggles with her return from the dark, still Halls of the Dead; her roommate is a tree climbing, colorful, energetic bisexual Japanese girl from a magical sugar land that exists in a state of constant, whimsical, nonsensical flux. The number of ace characters in modern literature is still woefully limited, and neither asexuality nor aromanticism are given enough of a focus to make them as well-known orientations as some others that readers may be more familiar with, so having these topics discussed, explained, and talked about in a way that fits in with the plot and story was great. Other characters include a trans boy that discovers himself during his time in his portal world, and the list of great characters just keeps growing.I’m going to review each of the books in the series individually at some point on my blog, but honestly, I recommend the series as a whole. It’s well-written, and each book expands upon the first, creating a more robust world and characters each time you visit Seanan McGuire’s writing. This is my most recommended book and book series for a reason: it’s wonderful!
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Top reviews from the United States
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This is different, strange, fantastical, weird and utterly wickedly wonderful and then someone dies.
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2018
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2017
Top reviews from other countries
Yvonne Marjot
Some doorways lead to dark places, and the children who return are marked in ways that are not always visible.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 26, 2017
Susan Stepney
what happens when you come back from fairyland?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 1, 2017BookWorm83
The prose is as beautiful as the title
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 31, 2019Amazon customer
How many pages?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 16, 2018Polly Morgan
Magical, whimsical and dark!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2021
