Every Heart a Doorway

But to give it credit where credit is due; there are a lot of thoughts about gender and queerness and a foreground about accepting people, knitted into the story pretty gracefully. And that's opposed to the Becky chambers sci-fi stories that really don’t do this gracefully.

Noted on October 16, 2025

This pivots to a murder mystery midway through, but it's just not skillfully plotted enough to pull off a murder mystery. And just not thematically consonant with the wistfulness of the stranded children?

Noted on October 16, 2025

Here's the pitch. You know kids - they're always slipping into other worlds, right? They duck through a wardrobe, they fall down a rabbit hole, their house gets picked up by a tornado. And then those kids come back. And when they come back, they're... different. They're not right. They've been changed by their experience. And they often desperately want to GO BACK.

Their poor parents, on the other hand, thought their little girl had ben kidnapped for two weeks, but when she arrives home she raves about spending a lifetime in a fairy kingdom. What to do? Well: there's a special boarding school for kids like that. The parents believe this school specializes in this specific psychological trauma. But the headmistress knows what the kids know: they've all been to other worlds.

Like: SUCH a good concept! I have Narnia pretty firmly anchored in my heart, and the wistfulness of: what if it was real, and you went, and then couldn't go back? is so evocative.

Of course this is covered better and more specifically in Lev Grossman's Magicians series - which answers: what if a kid who loved an ersatz Narnia series found out magic was real but he wasn't selected for Narnia? And then what if he WAS selected for Narnia but it just... didn't matter?.

But I think you could write a different kind of book about the LONGING of these different children and their different worlds. I think that's what McGuire was going for here... but then she just turned it into a murder mystery.

Noted on October 16, 2025

I saw this book referenced and was immediately struck by the concept; in fact I love the idea of this book so much it makes me slightly mad that I didn't write it. There's something so emotionally resonant with this concept, and the author just... doesn't really go anywhere with it. It's fine! I listened to the first three books in this series on a long solo road trip! I'll probably listen to them all. But it does feel like a kind of wasted opportunity and I wish a different author would've tackled it.

Noted on October 16, 2025