![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I certainly identified with the characters: I was as freakish as any teen, a nerdy bookworm with thick glasses, braces and bad skin, trapped in a redneck town long before social media. It’s the same universal truth that gives Harry Potter and the X-Men their dramatic power.īut I experienced an interesting dichotomy while reading it, one that ultimately has nothing to do with the author’s intentions. No teenager feels like they belong, and most feel like freaks of some kind. McGuire, who can pretty much write anything she puts her cursor to, does a great job conveying the kids’ pain, which of course speaks to the inner teen in all of us. We wish for a doorway, or a portal, or a wardrobe, to take us to another place, where all the things that make us different are normal. In structure the story is a murder mystery, but in intent it’s about the way many of us simply don’t feel like we belong in this world. In Seanan McGuire’s brilliant (and now award-winning) short novel Every Heart a Doorway, teens who’d once escaped reality to various fairytale realms find themselves back in our world, attending a special boarding school to help them re-acclimate to “reality.” They’re all desperate to return to those places where they felt accepted for who and what they were, and one of them wants this badly enough to kill. ![]()
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