2016 book 45

Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway
When I started this, I was so excited--it's a GREAT concept, and McGuire's writing felt so much more PURPOSEFUL than a lot of her recent work. It's about a special school--a school for children who have returned from various fantasy lands, to help them come to terms with the end of their magical adventures, all through the eyes of new student Nancy, who's just been sent away from an Underworld. But then McGuire decides to cram a murder mystery into this moving story, and there's just not enough THERE to support a mystery! Like, it is IMMEDIATELY obvious who the killer is, because there are only so many characters, and this whole book is only 176 pages. So that takes things in a bit of a downward direction--like, there are so many interesting avenues to explore, and that's where the story goes? And then the end is fairly anti-climactic. Sigh. This needed to be like fifty pages longer. B.


__
A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in April.