So I have a new author to go on my list of faves after discovering this book: Seanan McGuire. That’s both an awesome thing for my reading list and a terrible thing for my bank account as she’s got several series out that I can already tell I’m going to love.
But I’m not talking about those books right now; I’m talking about her recent release EVERY HEART A DOORWAY. This is one of those books where I have basically no complaints beyond that it was so short (technically a novella I think?) and I would have lived in that world for hundreds of thousands of words.
The premise is set around a boarding school for the travelers: children who found their door ala Wonderland or Narnia but can’t adjust back to the normal world now that they’ve returned home. Good lord the concept and world building was GORGEOUS, y’all. It was everything I could have hoped for with this idea from Eleanor, the woman who opened the school after her own travels, to her assistant who was physically changed by her Home, to all of the myriad students with their leanings toward Nonsense or Logic or Wickedness or Virtue.
This wasn’t a happy Disney fairy tale any more than the worlds beyond the doors ever are. The story gets darker than I expected from the jacket description (that might have been different had I read McGuire’s urban fantasy series prior to this LOL) but it does so in a way that makes total sense with the world and characters involved.
I will say I saw part of the twist coming before the reveal, but I still missed some major points. Being a writer, I’ve noticed lately I can see more and more story points coming in the books I read, but McGuire still managed to surprise me with the details and the motivations of the characters, and I loved that.
So yeah, if you were like me and dreamed of finding your own wardrobe or looking glass as a child, this is definitely a novella for you!