This is a very easy sell, especially to people moving from YA to adult for the first time, or just starting with fantasy. I think Seanan McGuire and I are just never going to get on, but I've sold many copies to enthusiastic customers.

This book manages to be both charming and thrilling at the same time, and kicks off what I consider to be one of my all-time favorite fantasy series.

Yes there is a murder mystery, but the plot or arc that I appreciated most is the one that Nancy is experiencing, as she returns to the real world and has to try and understand how she has been changed and what that means for her now.

We all go through experiences that change us, and this is such a poignant examination of how there can be good changes, and bad. Although Nancy is left longing for a place that she can (for now) never get back to, there is hope as she starts to understand that she can make her way in the real world again, and that she is not alone.

Every Heart a Doorway is the first installment in author Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children. Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children is a magical and dark atmosphere. It is a story that is character driven. Each of the individuals we meet in this story has returned from a portal world, think Alice in Wonderland or The Chronicles of Narnia, and find themselves unable to cope with life back in our world. Hence their placement at the School for Wayward Children. This story introduces readers to a cast of character who you will meet in the rest of the novellas to come.

"I was looking for a bucket in the cellar of our house, and I found this door I’d never seen before. When I went through, I was in a grove of pomegranate trees. I thought I’d fallen and hit my head. I kept going because … because…”


“How long were you gone?”

The question was meaningless. Nancy shook her head. “Forever. Years … I was there for years. I didn’t want to come back. Ever.”


Nancy is the newest arrival at the Mrs West’s Home for Wayward Children. She is one of many children who found a doorway and ended up elsewhere. She came from a place that you could call the Netherworld. She literally danced with the Lord of the Dead leaving her hair shocking white. She didn’t want to leave but was told to make sure she’s making the right choice before coming back. Curiously or not, tragedy strike almost immediately when her roommate Sumi is found dead, and subsequent deaths make it possible that Eleanor will have to close the school to protect the children.

The cast of this book can be best described as: every single token-[insert minority of your choice here] character, written in the most clichéd and flat way possible, combined. This extends to both their characters, as well as their worlds and honestly does more to further some prejudices than it does to counter them. The most identifiable characters in this book are Jack and Jill who will star in the next installment Down Among the Sticks and Bones.

This is a dark book, but it's not without dark humor. The teenagers in this book are, well, teenagers. And no matter what world they've visited, the snark and rebellion is still there.

This was a wonderful addition to the Wayward Children series. Every book tells an intricate and magical tale, with danger, adventure, and thrills lurking around every corner

Thanks to NetGalley for my free review copy! I was intrigued by this book's description and really entranced by it! One thing that you don't get from the description is that this book is imaginative and magical (as described), but also very creepy and slightly gory. Not one that I wanted to read at night! I really enjoyed it and it was a fast read. Anyone who has enjoyed tales of children who travel to other worlds (fairy, mythological, or even Alice in Wonderlandish) will be interested in this story, which answers the question "How do you return to normal life after being kicked out of your personal Wonderland?"

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

First book in the Wayward Children series

4.75 stars

Nancy has been to a different world. A world where standing still and holding your breath to be a statue was considered to be special. Now Nancy is back in the world she originally lived in. Her parents don’t like her newly acquired stillness. It makes them uncomfortable. When an opportunity opens up for Nancy to attend Eleanor’s West Home for Wayward Children, they quickly send her there. The Home for Wayward Children is not what’s advertised as. It’s meant for children who have come back from the worlds they have stumbled upon. Everyone hungers to go back and some will do everything to get there even if it means murder. Part murder mystery and part fantasy portal tale, Every Heart a Doorway is a great mix of intense storyline that will leave you want to keep turning the page. McGuire is one my favorite authors currently writing. She tackles subjects like asexuality while not making it the focal point of the story. It’s just another aspect to the character’s identity. McGuire writes a world filled with intense suspense and mysterious wonder.


Whimsical Writing Scale: 5

“Stillness was safer. Stillness had saved her before, and it would save her now.”

The main female character is Nancy. Nancy is an interesting protagonist. She’s very cold and she doesn’t often show emotion. However, following Nancy is intriguing. She constantly asks questions and often finds out truths that people in the House would prefer to keep hidden. She is an interesting character to introduce the grand scape of the worlds that children travel to because she is not from a world of joy, but of cold stillness and melancholy. She thrives in that kind of world. It’s different to follow a character not ready to bloom around blossom and sing to deer.


Kick-Butt Heroine Scale: 4.25

The Villain- What a treat. I am so intrigued by the villain in this story. McGuire did a great job with not allowing us to see who it was until just the right time. Her motives are also horrifying and disturbing. I enjoy encountering a villain who is actually terrifying especially considering that the story was so chilling. The level of brutality that these girls faced was extreme. It was like something straight from a horror novel (which McGuire does well).


Villain Scale: 5

All of the characters in the novel are entertaining and intriguing. From Jack to Kade to Eleanor West. I loved finding out more about the worlds they had visited and how their personalities fit those worlds. These characters are standout and they have so much life in them.


Character Scale: 5

I listened to the audiobook for this novel and it was fantastic. It was a great novel and I can’t believe it took me so long to read it. The Wayward Children series is imaginative, dark, gritty, and entertaining.


Plotastic Scale: 5

“You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”

Cover Thoughts: I love this cover so much.

Thank you, Netgalley and Tor.com, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I've been a fan of McGuire for 10 years, since Rosemary and Rue, the beginning of October Daye. Absolutely love this new foray into the world of the fantastic.

This one is strange, dark, a bit fascinating and two bits repulsive book.
Might be I was expecting something else.
But let's talk about what has disappointed me in this quite short novel. First, a certain lack of internal logic - this was not about the life in the school for peculiar teenagers, the time frame was too short for it. A murder mystery it was not - the killer was just random and the mystery was not even built, the killings just went on randomly (there was certain logic in for the victims, some other questions like "but why the killings started in the time they started?" went unanswered).
What this book might be, is the "agitation" for all the "different" way of lives (in the context of the book they are sexual minorities) and the unusual crowd. But even this might be portrayed better and deeper in my opinion.

So, 2 stars it is.

Imagine being a teenager who never quite fit in, who never really felt at home in this world and who was always looking for a place they belonged. Now imagine one day opening a doorway into another world, a world that fitted you perfectly, where you found your people and finally felt happy. The children in this story all found one of those worlds and spent months or years happily living there only to, one terrible day, end up somehow back in our world, lost and desperately missing the place they had come to think of as home.

Families might be thrilled to have their missing loved one home but those children are less than happy with the latest change in their circumstance and are desperately looking for a way back to the place they really belong. But children who start talking about magical worlds and who are struggling to adjust don't exactly come across as sane to the adults around them. The unlucky ones might end up in an asylum, the lucky ones get sent to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. At least there they'll find people who will believe their tales of strange new worlds, others who have had similar experiences and who understand the desperate need to find those doorways once more. Eleanor herself travelled to another world as a child so she is best placed to help these teenagers adjust to their new circumstances.

Every Heart a Doorway is another fantastic story from Seanan McGuire, I was already a huge fan of her October Daye and Incryptid series but the Wayward Children world is something completely new and I loved every minute of it. I love the idea of all these different worlds out there and finding that place that just fits you in every possible way but the idea of then being forced to leave and return to somewhere that isn't home is pretty horrifying. There are so many worlds out there that nobody ever seems to end up in the same one but no matter how different their experiences were while they were away the experience of coming back to our world is just as awful so they all understand each other and what they are going through.

This book has such a wonderful cast of diverse characters and they're all unique and quirky in their own ways. You can really see how their personalities fit the places they visited and how it affects the way they interact with each other in the present too. The story is creepy and dark, there are several murders after all, but it also has enough humour to stop it being too heavy going. I'm absolutely in awe of Seanan McGuire's imagination, all of her series are so different but she manages to make them all feel like real places that you could actually visit. Every Heart a Doorway has less than 200 pages but she packs in so much story that you're not left feeling like you missed out. I don't think there are many authors out there that could achieve what she has here with such a low word count! I absolutely can't wait to continue this series & I'm looking forward to spending more time with the Wayward Children.

I liked this story and these characters! Although odd, they were drawn with sensitivity and kindness. I can see many good conversations happening as young people talk about this book. Kudos!

Full review to follow!

Quick thoughts:
- This is my first time encountering an asexual character in a book.
- Diverse characters! Aside from having an ace protagonist, this book also features a trans character, a Japanese character, and a Latino character.
- I really, really loved the fascinating premise of this book, and the execution certainly did not disappoint at all!
- Delightfully creepy and mysterious.
- Very atmospheric writing style.
- A murder mystery storyline that I really did not expect.
- Creative and well-written!

The world building was spot on and each novella focused on a different aspect of Faerie. Haunting and unforgettable. This whole series was absolutely the best thing I read last year. I nominated all three for LibraryReads and I recommend the series to everyone even remotely interested in fantasy.

(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

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.

2 stars sounds like it wasn't a very good story, right? And you would be half-correct...

This kinda felt like 2 separate stories - one about what happens to magical children when they come back through that magic door (think what Alice may have felt when she came back from Wonderland.) The other, a mystery about some murdered kids at the school and the "investigation" into them.

What did I love about it? The open 40 pages or so. Such wonderfully drawn characters and a world that feels like you just want to slip into it, no questions asked. I liked Nancy from the get-go, and warmed to Sumi as the story developed. There was a warmness to them both that I particularly liked. The prose was beautiful without resorting to flowery, cheesy phrases. I appreciated the fact that the story was loaded with diverse characters...

But, geez, it did get a little carried away with itself. Initially, I got frustrated with every new character seemingly having to make sure that everyone knew they were part of a push for diversity. It became just a little much, to be honest. Quite impressed that the characters were there but to seemingly harp on it at every turn was over the top.
And then the mystery - could have been so much better if the story had been longer. It felt like it was shoved in just so there was actually a plot, rather than just a bunch of kids getting accustomed to life "back" from their adventures. Didn't ever really get any depth to the mystery, but that could have been solved by being another 40-50 pages longer, allowing the characters to actually integrate with the story, rather than just being present in it. I think that makes sense...

I am going to give the second story a chance. It is about the same length but with some knowledge of the main characters, it may flow a bit better. It seems to tell the story of Jack and Jill - and that may very well be quite interesting. Only time will tell.


Paul
ARH

Not your average boarding school, not your average kids. Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children serves a population of children who have been physically wayward in ways that challenge credulity. Certainly the parents, who lost their child for a period of time and had them return, yet not quite the same, were unable to accept the answers to the inevitable question "Where were you?".

I love Seanan McGuire and this was an amazing book.

Reviewed by Doris on Bookmarked (http://bookmarked.bleatingheartpress.com/2017/07/14/2017-hugo-novellas-ballad-of-black-tom/)

Eleanor West runs a boarding school for specially-chosen children, children who are deemed deluded fantasists by the outside world. She tells their guardians that her school will cure them of their mental disorders. But the truth is stranger: Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is actually a refuge for protagonists of portal fantasies. This is where all the Alices, Dorothies, and Wendy Darlings end up after their adventures in magical worlds, to help them adapt to life back in the mundane world.

The main character is Nancy Whitman, a teenage girl newly enrolled in the school after a journey to the Halls of the Dead. Her roommate Sumi, on the other hand, has emerged from a colourful land of licorice flowers and candy corn farmers; her perkiness and constant babbling contrast sharply with Nancy’s gloomy demeanor. After meeting Sumi, Nancy runs into Kade, a sarcastic boy with a history in a land of fairies and goblins; Jack and Jill, twins who spent time in a Gothic world of vampires and mad scientists; and Christopher, a boy initially reluctant to discuss the exact nature of his journey.

Then, one of the students is found dead and dismembered. The pupils are thrown into a panic, pointing fingers at potential culprits while fearing for their own lives. Nancy and her circle of friends begin using their respective gifts in an effort to halt the murderer before anyone else falls victim.

Every Heart a Doorway is yet another metafictional novella on the Hugo ballot. This time it is not Lovecraft under the microscope, however, but portal fantasies, and Seanan McGuire has fun reconciling different strands of this genre before placing them all into a macabre murder mystery.

The story establishes that portal worlds fit along two axes, one running from Logic to Nonsense, the other from Virtue to Wickedness. For example, in the corner of Virtue and Nonsense are the bizarre worlds of childlike glee; in the corner of Logic and Wickedness, meanwhile, lie the sinister and rule-driven realms of Hammer horror. The fact that protagonists in portal fantasies are traditionally female is reflected in the make-up of the school, where girls vastly outnumber boys at the school. As one pupil explains, boys tend not to have fantastic adventures because they are “too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties…we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

Like many a portal fantasy, Every Heart a Doorway is in large part a story about growing up. The students are of an age where they have started to outgrow childhood daydreams, as symbolized by their departure from their respective portal worlds, but still use fantasies to make sense of the adult world. Interestingly, the various fantasylands appear to map onto youth subcultures. Kids who have visited the darker realms return as some flavor of Goth–with variations ranging from Nancy’s emo stylings to Jack and Jill’s more elaborate Goth Lolita get-up–while bubbly Sumi has more of a Harajuku aesthetic.

This theme of identity runs deeper than mere fashion sense. Nancy is asexual and is given a chunk of dialogue explaining that this is different from being either aromantic or voluntarily celibate. Kade is transgender, a fact that has a part in his backstory; the fairies who took him to their world prefer to spirit away girls, and so rejected him when they realized the nature of his gender identity. Sumi, with her misjudgment of social cues, is arguably coded as autistic. In this way, the characters seem rather like Tumblr profiles come to life: fandom, sexuality, gender identity, and neuroatypicality.

Even within this school for misfits, there are cliques and out-groups. The kids who spent time in Gothic worlds are treated with mistrust by their schoolmates. But it is their Goth sensibilities that allow them to save the day. They are emotionally detached from the subject of death, and so do not succumb to the panic that sweeps the rest of the school. Notably, they have spent time in worlds dominated by overbearing male figures–or, in the case of Kade, a rigidly feminine world with no time for those who break gender norms–which appears to have lent them a better sense of justice then their finger-pointing classmates.

“We went to good, respectable worlds,” says preppy Angela at one point. “Moonbeams and rainbows an unicorn tears, not… not skeletons and dead people and deciding to be boys when we’re really girls!”

Every Heart a Doorway begins with an engaging recursive fantasy premise; it then adds a new layer of meta by becoming a murder mystery. In the process, it offers a thoughtful portrayal of the way in which the consumption and sharing of fantasy informs adolescents and their subcultures. A fitting portal fantasy for the era of social media.

SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE, BEWARE!!!

This, while a great premise, written well with believable characters and an ending that made me tear up, was not a full five stars for me.

Because JILLIAN.

What the ABSOLUTE WHAT?!?!?!??!

HATE her. COMPLETELY, venomously, HATE her.

Which just shows you how well written the characters are that I can hate one of them that deeply. I also love Nancy and Christopher. Jack I was on the fence about, until I read book two. Yeah, let's just say the twins are both about equal in my POV. I'll explain in that book review, coming up.

I want my own door, leading to a world of nothing but comfy chairs, cozy fireplaces, a purring cat on the lap and ALL THE BOOKS AND TIME TO READ THEM. No distractions, no other cares. Just reading. Sigh.

So this was an awesome book, but there was one part that made me absolutely SCREAM in rage and almost DNF right then and there. Glad I pushed past it, as I would have missed out on a lot of good stuff. But really, was that necessary, about Loreil? Rubbing it in about how her door, etc.? MEAN!

4.5 stars, rounded down to 4 because JILLIAN. Quick read, recommended if you like sci-fi/fantasy in a contemporary setting. I wouldn't call it urban fantasy, because it's not in a city setting. I would say this is good for YA on up, with maybe the strong middle reader. No sex, but lots of diverse characters with different sexual and gender orientations. Which makes sense, in a way, as those who don't feel like they fit in would be the ones most likely to find a door to their true "home". We've come a long way, but I am sure those who aren't the social definition of "normal" still feel like the odd one out or worse.

Great book, lots of layers to make one think. I recommend it,

My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire: The concept is brilliant: it’s about a boarding school for teens who went to other worlds and then came back to our world, and of course have trouble fitting in. McGuire chose a longing, bittersweet, angry tone for the story; the characters are only truly happy if, by some rare chance, they manage to get back to their fairylands of nonsense or logic or even horror. They don’t like to accept they might be trapped here forever, and some will do almost anything to go back Home. I’d love to see some commentary on this story in relation to various famous portal fantasies.

I'm still on the fence with this book. The writing style wasn't great but the storyline was good. For a short easy read it's worth a read.

A dark and wonderful tale that pulls you in. I cannot wait for the second book in the series.