Review: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
Reviews / April 20, 2016

What an odd and magical story this was! I’ve only read one other Seanan McGuire story, but from what I understand, she seems to be one of those authors who reinvents herself with each story she writes. Every Heart a Doorway can be read on several levels, and only writers with great skill are able to pull that off successfully, in my opinion. McGuire does so brilliantly, giving us a magical yet menacing tale of a group of teens who have been sent to a special school in order to deal with a very unusual loss, a tale that quickly becomes a murder mystery. But dig deeper and this story is about growing up and leaving childhood behind. For such a short novella, McGuire gives her readers everything they could want: a fascinating premise for a story, a tantalizing mystery, and even hard-hitting emotional content. The story revolves around Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a school where children and teens who have found a secret doorway to another world and then been cast out of that world can come to be rehabilitated. Each student has spent time—often years—in one of many worlds, and all of them are trying to…