Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
173 pages
Published 2016
Read from May 10 to May 12
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Some books go on too long, bloviating along way past what the story, the characters, or my interest can support. Every Heart a Doorway is the opposite, a rarity: a book that would be much improved had it been twice the length. I love so much about this little tale. The central conceit, a boarding school for children unable to find their way back to magical story worlds, is a mishmash of several modern fantasy cliches, mingling a little bit of everything from The Magicians to Among Others to Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books, as well as everything those novels had drawn from in turn, and while McGuire's Home for Wayward Children itself feels a bit rote, there's still enough charm and life to the cliches to sustain it. The characters here were a delight -- I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories. There is just enough space here to outline the experiences of the central characters, but never enough to satisfy. If McGuire wrote a trilogy about, say, the Addams sisters' adventures on the Moor, I would read the hell out of it. Alas, this book is just long enough to have gotten me wanting more. There is some emotional impact in how the characters' fates are resolved, but the book ends before I really felt attached to them. I need more.
The biggest weakness of Doorway, to my idiosyncratic tastes, was the central murder-mystery plotline. I find it difficult to give a shit about murder mysteries. If I pick up a new book with an intriguing cover, and I see from the jacket flap summary that a murder sets the story in motion, I put it right back on the shelf. Of all the cheap, lazy ways to generate a plot, a mysterious death is among the cheapest and laziest -- not to mention hokey, overdone, and dreadfully dull. If we're only going to spend less than two hundred pages with these characters, why waste pages that could be filled with thoughtful character moments and insights to develop some rote magical killer plotline? It cheapens the whole book for me. But I guess that's one of my personal peculiarities.
Had it been twice the length, and propelled by something more interesting than a murder mystery, Doorway could have been an amazing novel. As it is, I can only say it was pretty good.
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