Every Heart a Doorway Reveals What Happens When You Can’t Get Back to Narnia

At Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, there are no solicitations, no visitors, and no quests. The privacy is important, because Eleanor’s pupils aren’t so much wayward as they are wayfarers. These children found doors to magical worlds. Unfortunately for most of them, these were round trips, and they’ve returned to this world, and to families who are having a hard time taking back children they no longer understand. Because doors to other worlds aren’t real, you see. You can’t really just cross over to Fairy Land through your sock drawer, can you? Parents deposit their fantasyland refugees at Eleanor West’s school to learn this truth, but what they don’t realize is that Eleanor West doesn’t agree with the premise in the slightest. As she tells her students, “‘real’ is a four-letter word, and I’ll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.”
Her pupils find support among their peers, though the places they’ve been vary wildly in climate and temperament: some stumbled into a kind of Neverland, while others awoke in something more akin to Tartarus. There are Nonsense and Logic worlds, and Wicked and Virtue worlds, but the one thing they all have in common: they’re exceedingly difficult to return to. Part of the curriculum at Eleanor West involves coming to terms with the fact that you may never find your door again, that you may never return to the place you’ve come to call “home.”
Every student’s journey has left them altered. Nancy roamed the Halls of the Dead and returned with a Cruella de Vil ‘do and a frightening ability to maintain statue-like stillness. She’s got little time to play at being the bright, bubbly girl her parents think they’ve lost.
Nancy fits in with the band of misfits at the school more than she does anywhere else, but soon after her arrival, she’s faced with death once more when a series of murders shake the school. Together, the students will need to band together to track down a killer and save the one refuge they have in a now unfamiliar world.
McGuire packs ample amount of action into these few pages, but the story never feels rushed, and each character has room to breathe (though you’ll be grateful to learn that she plans to follow some of their stories in subsequent novellas). You’ll come to love the boy who speaks to bones, almost as much as the Nonsense girl who speaks in rhymes and linguistic loop-de-loops. The prose never ceases to be as darkly ethereal, as otherworldly, as the characters.
Perhaps more remarkable is how much this story reads like s “fairytale” written by one of these wayward children, while simultaneously unpacking contemporary issues with a thoroughly modern, matter-of-fact delicacy. Take, for example, the transgender student seeking a path to recovery from not only the severing of his reality, but of his identity.
McGuire cleverly addresses the disproportionate ratio of female students to males with sly social commentary: “boys will be boys” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a teacher explains. We are always waiting for boys to stray, expecting them to wander where they’re not, and they never have an opportunity to find an unexpected door. “We notice the silence of men,” she explains. “We depend upon the silence of women.”

The classic tale with a modern twist is a Seanan McGuire specialty, and she’s left her mark on the portal fantasy trope. Of course, she’s been mixing old and new throughout her career, even when writing as Mira Grant, her science fiction alter ego. In fact, nothing sets up this story, and the respective journeys of each of its characters, quite like a passage from her Parasitology series. In that trilogy, the key to discovering the truth about rogue parasitic implants actually lies in a refrain from an obscure children’s book:
some lies better left untold;
some dreams better left unsold.
the broken doors are open.
come and enter, and be home.
my darling girl, be careful now,
and don’t go out alone
The broken doors are open, and you should come and enter. Every Heart a Doorway feels like home.