Every Heart a Doorway transports and transforms the reader
Every Heart a Doorway
by Seanan McGuire
Macmillan-Tor/Forge
Tor.com
Sci Fi & Fantasy
Pub Date: April 5, 2016
Review
Seanan McGuire's novels transport the reader into mythic worlds both beautiful and terrifying. She captures what is just out of view and draws it into the light. Every Heart a Doorway considers what becomes of those children who step into alien worlds, experience grand adventures, and return home forever changed to a world that no longer fits. Their parents cannot understand. Their perception of reality is too rigid to allow other worlds. Nor can they understand their children's longing to return to a magical world that no longer wants them. After living an adventure, seeing sights that amaze, wouldn't you too want to return, even if the cost is dear?
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is a place for these children to learn how to live if they cannot find a way back. After her own adventure, Nancy is sent to Eleanor West's home. Here she discovers she is not only believed but that there are others, who have been to different places and had different experiences, worlds of nonsense or logic, of virtue or wickedness, and even more bizarre places almost beyond imagining.
Yet trouble is brewing, and murder follows.
Whether you should read Every Heart a Doorway, my answer is a paraphrase of a segment of Every Heart a Doorway - the question wasn't whether or not it could be done, but should it be done - and the answer is always yes. A good fantasy entertains, a truly great fantasy lingers in the mind long after the final chapter has been read. Every Heart a Doorway is truly an amazing novel.
5/5
I received a copy of Every Heart a Doorway from the publisher and netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.
--Crittermom
Description
Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children
No Solicitations
No Visitors
No Quests
Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else.
But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.
Nancy tumbled once, but now she's back. The things she's experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West's care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.
But Nancy's arrival marks a change at the Home. There's a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it's up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of things.
No matter the cost.
