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‘Every Heart a Doorway’ by Seanan McGuire

18 Jul 2022

Synopsis Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. No solicitations. No visitors. No quests. Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world. But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her newfound schoolmates to get to the heart of the matter. No matter the cost. About the book Whatever happened to all those children in fantasy novels who come back from fantastic worlds? When Lucy emerged from the wardrobe, or Alice from the looking glass, or Max from the Land of the Wild Things? Surely that’s got to be a traumatic re-entry into mundane reality. ‘Every Heart a Doorway’ takes that idea and runs with it, introducing us to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, where such children are given a safe place to recover and recuperate after they’ve been kicked out of the worlds they’ve come to call home. Some of the children have been to lands of order, some to lands of chaos, some to dark, some to light. They’ve run across rainbows and through the moors; they’ve been to fairy lands and goblin markets, to candy lands and underworlds. But they all have one thing in common – they have been kicked out and forced to return home. Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is where despairing parents send their troubled kids – the ones who claim to have been to a different world. Eleanor West promises to help them, and she does, just not in the way the parents imagine. Eleanor has been to her own world and she knows the sadness and loss these children experience when they are dragged back to the “real” world. She offers them a place where they can be believed. Many of these kids just want to get back to their home, their real home, the place where they truly feel like they belong. How hard it is to live in this world while knowing that somewhere out there is a doorway that leads to where you’re supposed to be. But, as Nancy finally comes to realise – “nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me.” Memorable quotes “You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you”  “She was a story, not an epilogue”  “This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm”  “It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less”  “Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world, hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep holding on to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying: ‘Don’t use this word’ and ‘don’t use that word,’ but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope”  “Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong”  “The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just...in a different way”                                                                                         PHOTOS © TUMBLR, AMAZON, FACEBOOK


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