Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire

I really fell in love with the Wayward Children series when I picked up a "prequel" giving the backstory of Katherine Lundy in In an Absent Dream (you can read that review here). I hadn't realized it was a part of a series until halfway through but a prequel is a decent way to start a series anyway.

In Every Heart a Doorway, we are first introduced to The Home for Wayward Children and its headmistress, Eleanor West. It seems some children are special. Disappearing through doorways and down wells and into other lands and other realities where the rules are different. Sometimes there are no rules. In Lundy's case, she had gone to the Goblin Market, a place of high logic and wickedness. It seems every world that children fall into go into one of four cardinal directions - nonsense, logic, wickedness, and virtue, as they are explained to Nancy on her first day at the Home.

While In an Absent Dream was a very specific journey into the land of the Goblin Market, Every Heart a Doorway introduces many different worlds through their former inhabitants. Those former inhabitants now reside at the Home, mostly waiting, wishing to return to the worlds from which they were expelled. Having lived in a reality particularly crafted for their personalities, existing in our world, the normal existence is painful.

Lundy is a teacher there, trying to help the children cope with the reality that most of them will not be going back. Nancy refuses to believe this. She has come from the Halls of the Dead and wants very much to return. "Be sure" all the doors tell their travelers and Nancy's was no exception. But how can you be sure when you go only the one time? How can you be sure when you don't know what is lying beyond the door? The Lord of the Dead wants Nancy to be sure. So she heads home where her parents are aghast at her black clothes and bleached hair. They pack her off to the Home with a suitcase full of clothing that would make a flamingo blush.

But once she arrives at the Home, she is quickly shunned by the other students except her new roommate Sumi, Sumi's friend Cade, and the odd twins Jack and Jill. And this would be fine to bide her time while she waits for the Lord of the Dead to send another door, but... Sumi is murdered. Then another girl, and another girl. So this doesn't seem like it's going to work out very well.

So this is part fantasy and part mystery and all just very very good. Because at its core, the Wayward Children series takes those things about us that as teenagers or younger we had such a hard time defining and living with, identifying them as special and then making those traits work somewhere else where we get to really be ourselves. It shouldn't be a surprise that LGBT themes are prevalent in the books or that the characters come from diverse backgrounds. It makes the series really great. There's so much richness in the language and the visuals of the created worlds. Seanan McGuire is a treasure.

4/5 Stars.