Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Every Heart a Doorway

Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is, so Eleanor tells the concerned relatives of children who claim to have gone through a magical portal to a different world, a boarding school where they will help to cure your child’s delusions. Eleanor is lying through her teeth. Her school is actually the opposite: it’s a place where these children and teens will be not only believed, but understood, and where they will have the company of others who, like them, desperately long to find a door that will take them back to the magical land they love, the place they feel they truly belong. Eleanor herself, in fact, had come from such a magical place, and still longs to go back. But magical portals are tricky things, and most of those who are sent back to our world, for various reasons, are never able to find their way back again.

Nancy Whitman, a new arrival at Eleanor West’s school, is one such girl, desperately unhappy to be parted from the quiet, still underworld where she served the Lord of the Dead, and thrown back into a busy world that is too colorful and restless. She begins to adjust to life at the school, where they spend most of their time examining the issues with portals and dividing magical lands according to their nature (Logic vs. Nonsense, Virtue vs. Wickedness). But when Nancy has been there only a couple of days, there is a shocking murder of one of the students and, soon after, another murder. Suspicion of each other mounts among the students at the Home for Wayward Children, and accusations fly.

Every Heart a Doorway is an excellent novella in many ways. With evocative writing laced with sly humor, Seanan McGuire explores the feelings of those who are misfits in our world: their longing for what has been lost and might never be found again, the pain of not being understood, and of not belonging where they are now. These themes of being lost and misunderstood mesh well with the diverse cast of characters: Nancy is asexual; her roommate Sumi is of Japanese descent; their friend Kade has gender dysphoria, identifying as a boy though he is genetically a girl; Jack and Jill, identical twins, could hardly be more dissimilar in their characters. The diversity of characters, and the diversity of fantasy worlds that each of these characters longs for, made for an intriguing novella with a lot of different angles and facets to consider.

Unfortunately, the plot was weaker than the world-building. It was almost impossible to suspend disbelief to the extent necessary to buy into the bizarre way in which the murder investigation is handled by Eleanor and others. The reasoning of the murderer, when eventually revealed, is pretty much ludicrous unless that character is just completely unhinged. And, as a mother, I was unsettled by the book’s dismissive attitude toward parents “who would never understand,” and that most of these children would leave their families behind forever without a second thought or even a good-bye, the unspoken message being that these parents deserve it because they’ve emotionally abandoned their kids by failing to believe their stories of their lives in an alternate magical world.

When Nancy asks one of the teachers why there are so many more girls than boys at the school, she is told:

“Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

Those two final sentences are eminently quotable, and at least the last sentence is too often true, but I’m not convinced by the logic tying those statements to the idea that it’s mostly girls who find their way to fantasy portals. After all, once a child enters through a magical portal, it doesn’t really matter how hard his or her parents search. That child simply isn’t going to be found by a search party! And in my experience parents generally are, if anything, more protective of their daughters than their sons.

Still, if you’re a reader who isn’t likely to be too bothered by logical holes or a liberal social viewpoint, Every Heart a Doorway is a fascinating world to enter, through the magical portal that McGuire creates for us as readers. It’s often insightful and deeply sympathetic toward those who are different, with an affirmative message.

That was her real story. Finding a place where she could be free. That’s your story, too, every one of you.

3.5 stars.

Initial post: 2017 Nebula award nominee in the novella category. Glad I grabbed this as a Tor monthly freebie, though! Who wants to pay $9.99 for a novella? not me ...

Diversity of worlds, diversity of characters; longing for what's been lost; the pain of not being understood, of not belonging where you are now... This was an intriguing novella with a lot of different angles and facets.