Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children #1) by Seanan McGuire

 

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire is really hard to describe in my usual glib manner.  We're at a school for children who have been cast out of magical worlds and really want to go back. Nancy is the newest student and when the students are in danger, she's the focus of suspicion.  It IS that, but it's so much more. 

This book is trying to do a lot.  First, she has to build a magical world that is actually composed of many magical worlds. Second, she has to make us care about this school, the students, and the teachers.  It's a lot to ask in the mere 165 pages of the thing.

But I have to admit that I adored this book. I thought it was bittersweet, charming, and darkly comedic. There's some trans and LGBTQ+ representation in the book that I thought was nicely done. I thought the worldbuilding was interesting. I really thought the headmistress of the school was fascinating and wanted to know more about her. 

Sure, I thought the mystery plot was weak and predictable. Sure, I wish the book had been twice as long to really delve into the alternate worlds. Sure, there are problems with this.  

But, if I'm being truly honest here, this was exactly the kind of book I dig and I was excited to learn that it's the start of a relatively long series. Sign me up for more.

(I did think the end was unbearably sad.)

4.5/5 stars

As a note of interest, probably only to me, McGuire also writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant and she wrote that mermaid book I was obsessed with at the end of last year.  

Lines of note:

She'd never been one of the popular girls in her high school, but she'd understood the game enough to play it, and play it well, to read the temperature of a room and find the safe shallows, where the currents of mean-girl intensity wouldn't wash her away, but where she wouldn't risk drowning in the brackish tide pools of the outcasts and the unwanted. (page 47)

This is how an extended metaphor should go!

"...You know, I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when I was a kid, and I never thought about what it would be like for Alice when she went back to where she'd started. I figured she'd just shrug and get over it. But I can't do that. Every time I close my eyes, I'm back in my real bed, in my real room, and all of this is a dream." (page 51)

Another interesting metaphor, this time on grief.