For such a short read, Every Heart a Doorway has remarkable depth. This is a story of identity, the loss of home, the search to find (or carve out) a place for oneself in the world. I don’t like giving away too much of the plot in reviews because seemingly insignificant details help a lot in setting context, feel and tone while reading so I’ll simply say this – on the face of it, this is a story about children who spend time in other worlds and for one reason or other have to leave those worlds. They don’t belong in the real world, and are trying to figure out how to get back, or barring that, figure out how to live in this world. The book goes from being a story of strange children in a strange school to becoming a murder mystery, and switch that I didn’t expect but ended up throughly enjoying. Actually, that line sums up my entire experience with this book rather accurately – I didn’t expect it, but I throughly enjoyed it.
A note on the setting and the characters: while the book is set in the present, with the internet and google and modern day clothing, it has a wonderfully quaint otherworldly feel to it. I know the characters are in the 21st century, but it feels like they’re in victorian England or something. And it had this feeling to it right from the start – the first time one of the characters is described as wearing jeans startled me a little bit. Added to this, the characters are really really odd. All of them. There isn’t a single ‘normal’ person at Miss. Eleanor’s School and that adds to the general disconnect with the world that Seanan McGuire captures so well.
This is definitely not a book for everyone. Hell, I didn’t think this was a book for me until about 40% of the way through. Its just…odd and unexpected. The whole otherworldliness thing is so pervasive in everything – the writing, the setting, the characters – that it took me a while to really get into it. But this disconnect somehow adds up and turns into a remarkable work of fiction. The entire thing feels timeless, and I think the book is going to be a strange, intense and wonderful read at whatever age one reads it, and whether one is reading it in this century or the next.
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