Every Heart a Doorway

[sawyl]

Despite it's brevity, Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway is well worth every penny. Indeed, I think it might be McGuire's very best work to date — and given the quality of her prolific output, that's saying something. Set in Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the book takes the idea of portal adventures seriously and sets about examining the sort of trauma children might suffer after being pushed back into the mundane world after being spending time in a fantasy land.

Nancy Whitman has been enrolled in the Home for Wayward Children by her worried parents; convince that their daughter is suffering the after effects of being held hostage for six months, they hope that Eleanor West's school might be able to fix their daughter. But Eleanor knows better: Nancy's problems stem not from a kidnapping but from the years she spent in the Halls of the Dead, a slow, formal, logical place where she learnt the knack of becoming a living statue.

Like many of the children, Nancy is convinced that her exile is temporary and that she will eventually be allowed back through her doorway. But her new roommate, who grew up in a Nonsense world and who has been at the school for a while, soon sets her straight:

"...hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world," said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. "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 on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left."

But this is not surprising. Unlike other schools, which encourage their charges to forget, Eleanor West has specifically selected a set of pupils who want to remember their experiences, however painful and regardless of whether they want to go back. Kade, in particular, expresses this conflict clearly: he loved his world which allowed him to be a prince and not a princess, but they expelled him when they discovered his nature, as did his parents when they realised that he was Kade rather than Katie. Nancy, who is considered eerie by the majority of the children who spent their away time in happy fantasy worlds, quickly finds friends among the schools outsiders.

But in the world at large, all the children are outsiders in their own ways, and that's why they went away. Because there's something unique about each of the pupils, regardless of where they went, that attracted their particular portal and drew them to a world that suited them, whether that was a world of rainbows or the gothic horror world of the Moors where twins Jack and Jill — full names Jacqueline and Gillian — found themselves.

"That's the thing people forget when they start talking about things in terms of good and evil," said Jack, turning to look at Lundy. She adjusted her glasses as she continued, "For us, the places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that fore the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.

The quiet, odd charm of the school is broken when a pupil is found dead, their body mutilated perimortem. Naturally gossip centres on the macabre group of outsiders, especially when they offer their special knowledge — Jack's scientific skills, Christopher's expertise with skeletons, and Nancy's knowledge of the rites of the death — to help Eleanor. But it isn't until the second murder that things the gossip really starts to spill over into full-on suspicion.

Every Heart a Doorway is a complete delight from start to finish. The world McGuire conjures up is completely authentic, from the school's scientific classification of different portal worlds — along the axes of Logic and Nonsense, and Wickness and Virtue — to Eleanor's pupil selection process which involves duping the parents for the greater good of their children. The characters are beautifully drawn and wonderfully precise. Nancy, still and cool, is a fixed centre point at the heart of the narrative. Kade, wise beyond his years, is the heart and Jack, a dapper, kinder Victor Frankenstein, is the keen mind who always knows what has to be done, even and especially when it is painful.