I have been passing around Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway for a month now.
It’s a lovely little book and a very quick read.
The premise makes the book sound more juvenile than it is–you know all those old tales of children disappearing into fairy realms–and how they sometimes come back?
In this book, that happens. And then parents don’t understand–don’t believe their children. Surely their children were abducted–surely they’re repressing something.
And so many of those children wind up at a boarding school, run by another who has returned.
This story is dark in all the right ways–with longing and loss and death.
Like all good fantasies, it poses moral questions about our own world–what do we do with those who don’t fit in? Why don’t we believe our children when they tell us who they really are–that they’re asexual, that our little “girl” is actually a boy, that they long for something we can never give?
