Every heart a doorway by Seanan McGuire
![cover image](https://www.readplus.com.au/covers/everyheartadoorway.jpg)
Wayward Children bk 1. St Martin's Press, 2016. ISBN
9780765385505
(Age: 15+) Recommended. Fantasy. Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for
Fantasy (2016), Alex Award (2017). Eleanor West's Home for Wayward
Children caters for children who have disappeared, tumbling through
doorways and into old wells and going into strange lands. When they
reluctantly reappear, the school looks after them when their parents
despair of them fitting back into normal society. Nancy's entry into
the home is not a smooth one with murder making a nasty appearance.
She and her group of misfits must find out what is happening, while
they search for the doorways back into their beloved fantasy lands.
This is not an easy book to categorise or to explain. It is short,
engrossing and strange, but very compelling. As well as the nasty
murders that must be solved there are many themes the reader will
have to explore and think about, not least why the children want to
return to the fantasy worlds and not to the life that is considered
normal by society.
There is an assortment of characters, including a weird scientist,
an asexual main character and nods toward gender diversity, none too
explicit but also thought provoking.
This is an extraordinary and perplexing story, one that stays with
the reader. I am sure to follow more in this series. (Seanan McGuire
also writes as Mira Grant).
Pat Pledger