McGuire's dialogue is witty yet organic, and she lingers luxuriantly on tiny, telling details - the fluttering of a curtain, the scent of chalk dust - that bring the Home to teeming life. Sumi's scattershot wisdom is both funny and profound Nancy's asexual crush on Kade, a trans classmate, is rendered in bold, sensitive strokes. The whodunit plot of Every Heart isn't complex or particularly suspenseful, but it doesn't need to be. And innocence is double-edged sword - something to be yearned for as well as distrusted.
THE WAYWARD REALMS GENRES FULL
Growing up isn't a linear process, McGuire puts forth, but a jumpy, chaotic one full of retrograde steps and conflicting rhythms. Sumi, who seems to be around Nancy's age, admits only to being "older than I look, younger than I ought to be." Lundy, the school's therapist, is aging backward as a result of her stay on the other side of reality. Heartbreakingly, Eleanor hopes senility will bring her closer to the land of Nonsense she fell into as a girl. When the gruesome murder of a fellow student sends Nancy, Sumi, and their friends into a frenzy of fear and suspicion, the ensuing mystery pulls out the best, worst, and most aching truths from them all.Įvery Heart is a quick read, but there's a lot to sink your teeth into. It also ties into her desire to return to the Underworld, a sumptuously morbid place that calls to her soul. As more students are introduced, their backstories surface - including Nancy's, and her reason for being such a still, taciturn person wind up being romantically poetic instead of tragic. Nancy is paired with a roommate named Sumi, who's every inch as erratic and colorful as Nancy is restrained and monochromatic. Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Some Kind of Fairytale by the late Graham Joyce have also mined this vein, with winning results. McGuire isn't the only author to toy with the notion of the portal fantasy in recent years. 'Every Heart' is a quick read, but there's a lot to sink your teeth into. At the home, Eleanor warns Nancy, "'Real' is a four-letter word." Their experiences vary greatly, but one thing unites almost all of them: They desperately wish they could shuffle off this mundane existence and return to the weird, wondrous worlds that forever altered them - and then cast them out. As it turns out, the rest of the Home's students have also survived trips through portals to various mystical domains - as did Eleanor herself when she was a girl. Her Alice in Wonderland-like visit to the Underworld left her permanently changed and wishing she were back with her beloved liege, the Lord of the Dead. Nancy quickly finds out why her parents sent her there: Although they think she's overcoming the trauma of a recent kidnapping, she's in fact just returned from a trip through a magic portal. Nancy Whitman, a willowy teen with black-and-white-streaked hair and an eerie air about her, is the latest admission to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school run by the enigmatic Ms.
Tight and tautly told, Every Heart grabs one of speculative fiction's most enduring tropes - the portal fantasy, where a person slips from the real world into a magical realm somewhere beyond - and wrings it for all the poignancy, dark humor, and head-spinning twists it can get. Rather, she's doubled down - and in half the number of pages. That hasn't changed in her new novella, Every Heart a Doorway. Seanan McGuire's award-winning novels and short stories have been testing the parameters of genre fiction for years now, but always with a deep love of horror and fantasy. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Every Heart a Doorway Author Seanan McGuire
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