BOOK | ‘Every Heart a Doorway’ by Seanan McGuire Review
Imagine your perfect world - one catered to your every desire. Is it high logic, with relieving order and ways to prove yourself? Or perhaps high nonsense, where the world is full of chaos and colour?
These are the questions that every character in Seanan McGuire’s ‘Every Heart a Doorway’ faces. For those looking for a quick, one-sitting read complete with interesting and diverse characters, brilliant fantasy worlds (plural) and an all-out intriguing concept, then this book is a must.
Sitting just under 170 pages, ‘Every Heart a Doorway’ follows Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. From an outsider’s perspective the children’s home is for troubled children of various ages and backgrounds who have all experienced a disappearance in their youth.
However, it is from the inside that the fantastical details of these disappearances and the home’s true purpose is revealed. Each of the children are in therapy for the terrible ejection from their home worlds - other worlds where they truly fit in and which makes sense.
Nancy is a new arrival at West’s home, and she is struggling not just with returning to this world of sunlight and bright colours, but with her parents’ refusal to believe that she is not the same girl that disappeared on them.
Not long after she arrives to the peculiar home, a murder mystery begins to unfold, and as the new arrival from an underworld, she is quickly facing the serious suspicion of her fellow students.
‘Every Heart a Doorway’ is powerful. The limited number of words, pages and scenes are not hindrance; they ensure that every moment makes an impact, and that who is included and what words are shared matters.
Importantly, the majority of characters are female, and of the male characters that have more than one line or a brief mention, one is latinx and the other a trans boy. It seems the author was very specific with who he included in his novel, as each secondary character as a purpose.
Further to that, McGuire writes: a Japanese American female character, and Nancy - the asexual protagonist. There are people of different class and knowledge backgrounds, and these are all reflected in the worlds they have been to.
More a novella than a novel, the book maintains a fast-paced plot that affects the murder mystery element in its ability to create tension and suspense effectively.
However, very little time passes between the first murder and the resolution though; this means that the tension and anxiety previously created in the novella dwindles, and is not able to manifest with readers well.
It also suggests that the action of the plot plays second to the unique setting and premise of the book - the nature of other bizarre worlds. An honest reader would recommend that this book remove the murder mystery element, and instead focus on the different worlds the children have been to and returned from.
The diversity and unique development of the worlds are the highlights in ‘Every Doorway a Heart’. The describing of each other’s worlds is not just a way to break the ice in the home, but it is a crucial part of their therapy.
Each world was well thought out by McGuire: from the dark and complex underworlds that characters like Nancy, Jack and Jill all come from, to the highly nonsensical worlds characters Sumi and Angela returned from. It displays the different things people crave and find solace in – for some, it’s the light, and others the dark.
Perhaps the story’s most interesting aspect is that the characters who receive the most focus: Nancy, Jack and Jill, Kade and Christopher stem from the darker, morally ambiguous worlds and that they earn more sympathy than most of the others. For instance, Nancy is comfortable with the dead, but it could be argued that she has more respect for people who are dead than the living. She believes, and has experienced in her own underworld, that people are not miserable when they are dead.
Jack and Jill, the female twins who shared the same world but vastly different experiences, are both the most morally ambiguous. Jack (short for Jacqueline) is a woman of science and is in no ways squeamish. She hoards toxic chemicals, is fascinated by gore and the human body, and reveals that in her world she often has to retrieve cadavers and work on them for her mentor.
Jill, on the other hand, once had an odd fetishist relationship with her vampiric master, and seems very bitter about her return. These two characters are interesting due to their histories, and the complicated relationship they hold. The twins will be the subject of the companion novel, ‘Down Among the Sticks and Bones’ due to be released June 13 this year.
‘Every Heart a Doorway’ deals with themes of good, evil and the grey area in-between. What constitutes home, and at the heart of it all, acceptance of difference?
‘Every Heart a Doorway’ is available in all good bookstores now.
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