Wonderland, Oz, Neverland, Narnia, Faerie, literature is filled with stories of people, usually young, often girls, who find themselves in magical worlds and have grand adventures there before returning to the reality they came from. Those books, however, typically end with the homecoming. What happens after, especially if that other world felt more like home to the traveler than that place with their parents ever did? In Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, that is where Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children comes in.
Nancy is new to the school. She spent years in the Halls of the Dead, loving the stillness and the silence and the richness of the black velvet sky. For her parents, it was six months of wondering where their daughter went. Three months after Nancy had to return to the world of her birth, her parents are still waiting for their “real” daughter to come back, the one who fit in a world of bright, hot, quick things and wore a rainbow of colors, rather than stark black and white. They think the school will bring that girl back, but that’s not what Ely West is trying to do. She is giving these teenagers a place where they can be with others who understand what they went through until they are either old enough to go out on their own or until the world that feels like their real home calls them back. Now Nancy has a roommate named Sumi, who traveled to the Nonsense world of Confection and returned unwilling to be the violin-playing A-student her parents wanted, and is getting to know the likes of Jack and Jill, twin sisters who had to flee a mob with torches and pitchforks when one of them overstepped the bounds of a world of mad scientists and monsters, and Kade, a transboy who was thrown out of a fairy court when they found out that the girl they thought was a princess was better suited to being a prince. Then the murders start, imperiling the school’s existence and causing many of the students to eye both Nancy, with her affinity for the dead, and Jack, the former apprentice to a mad scientist in the mode of Frankenstein, with suspicion. Can they find the real killer before more lives are lost?
Every Heart a Doorway is a quick read, full of atmosphere and touches of dark humor. While the characters are in their teens, be aware that the book contains frank discussions of sexuality, including asexuality, and rather grisly descriptions of death. I would recommend this book to anyone who can handle reading those situations and has ever felt that they were out of place. Personally, while the ending makes for a very satisfying conclusion to read this as a standalone novel, I am thrilled that McGuire already has sequels in the works, with two more books with these characters due out in the next two years.