This month, I read Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, a Hugo AND Nebula Award-winning novel about a home for children who have accidentally journeyed into other dimensions, returning to this world physically unharmed and yet, forever changed.
The book itself is a rollercoaster in 169 pages. It begins with the main character, Nancy, arriving at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, knowing not what to expect but ready to escape the suffocating environment of her home life. As a young girl, Nancy had accidentally fallen into a portal to another world, a place she came to know as the Hall of the Dead: a palace where skeletal figures dined on pomegranates and danced with death. Nancy reflects on her time in the Hall of the Dead with nostalgic longing, seeing the world that she returned to as insufferable, and the parents that push her to be “normal” as utterly out of touch.
As we get to know Nancy, we watch her form relationships with the other children in the home, who each went to wild and strange dimensions of their own. For example, she meets Kade, an young man with a thick Oklahoma accent who had gone to a "fairyland" known as Prism, where he lived among magical fairies and battled the goblin king before being unceremoniously dumped back into the Human world.
We eventually learn that Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children isn't the sanctuary we had first thought. Children start to be picked off one by one by a mysterious killer, and the whole house goes on high alert. Nancy and her new friends are thrown into a mystery with the highest stakes imaginable, and the book becomes completely engrossing from that point on.
Something I appreciated about this book was the LGBTQ+ representation and diversity. Nancy is asexual, but not aromantic, and those layers of her identity are explored in her interactions with the handsome and charming Kade, a trans man whose transgender identity is a part of his backstory in regards to the all-female fairy realm which he had visited as a young child. Overall, the diversity of the characters one of this book's biggest strengths.
The author, Seanan McGuire is also known for the InCryptid series of novels, which follows a cryptid hunter named Verity Price who protects the citizens of New York City from monsters beyond imagination.
This book was sometimes creepy, sometimes heartwarming, but always thought-provoking. We've all read books or seen movies where adolescent characters find themselves transported to another world, but rarely do we see what happens to those characters when they find themselves back in the normal world. The concept alone is unique and full of potential. My only critique about this book was that it wasn't long enough, I would have loved reading even more about what's next for Nancy. I would highly recommend this book to fans of YA Horror, as well as anyone who's interested in fresh takes on classic tropes. This book has got to be a 10/10, it's easy to see why this author has been so highly awarded!
-Artemis, Co-Owner of Epic Quest Books