Read All About It: Every Heart A Doorway

Just last weekend, this excellent, incandescent novella won the 2017 Nebula award for Best Novella. I had picked it up at a local book fair the day before, having heard about it through Seanan McGuire's twitter, and, wanting to read more of McGuire's books, I picked it up immediately. I have absolutely no regrets--this novella is a work of love and art that ended in my own tears of joy, and I highly recommend that you read it.

This novella reminded me of the popular series "Ms. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," in that it involved very odd children under the care of a loving mother figure (the home is even called "Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children), but the similarity ends there. McGuire's writing takes on the challenge of focusing more on how the children were effected by an event that was not under their control, rather than powers that they exhibit.

Image Source: goodreads.com

Each child in Eleanor West's Home is a child who went through a strange doorway to another land--maybe an iteration of a fairy land, or an underworld, or even a place where you travel by rainbow--and have somehow made their way back to the "regular" world--usually by accident, or unfortunate circumstances. Eleanor does her best to take care of the children, usually abandoned by their parents on her doorstep in an effort to make them "civilized" again. The children, who may or may not be able to find their way back to the worlds they considered home, struggle to reintegrate with society, and often don't make it back at all and are forced to live in the regular world forever.

However, there is trouble at the boarding school. Someone is hurting people at the school, and Nancy--the newest student at Eleanor's school, who came from an Underworld where she lived in peace and stillness--along with some of her schoolmates are doing their best to figure out just who is behind the danger lurking in every corner, and maybe find their own doorways back home in the process.

I was not expecting to be as affected by this novella as I was. I underestimated the pull of a novella that wins a Nebula, and this book truly deserved that title. I really loved it. It was beautiful and heartbreaking and at times terrifying, which is what every good book should be. Every tiny piece of this novella was written with great skill, and this has definitely convinced me to give McGuire's several other series a try (she also writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant).