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Question Every Heart a Doorway

8 years 9 months ago #1 by Arcanist Lupus
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    • I just finished Every Heart a Doorway, a novella by Seanan McGuire, and it is absolutely wonderful.

    The premise follows a teenage girl coming to a boarding school for children who have come back from Narnia/Oz style fantasy adventures, but would have preferred not to have returned to Earth. They've come back after years of adventures to find that only a few weeks or months have passed, and they've grown up in ways that their parents can't understand, so they come to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children where they don't have to pretend that it was all just a dream, learn to live in a world that doesn't fit quite right, and maybe, maybe find their doorway back home.



    Slight content warning - despite the premise that draws heavily from children's books like Oz, Alice, and Narnia, this is not a novella for young children. There is some gore and discussion of sex (as teenagers will), although neither is excessive. Although all the worlds described are beloved by those who visited them, not all are rainbows and sunshine.
    "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy." - Spider Robinson
    8 years 9 months ago - 8 years 9 months ago #2 by Malady
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    • Arcanist Lupus wrote: I just finished Every Heart a Doorway, a novella by Seanan McGuire, and it is absolutely wonderful.

    The premise follows a teenage girl coming to a boarding school for children who have come back from Narnia/Oz style fantasy adventures, but would have preferred not to have returned to Earth. They've come back after years of adventures to find that only a few weeks or months have passed, and they've grown up in ways that their parents can't understand, so they come to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children where they don't have to pretend that it was all just a dream, learn to live in a world that doesn't fit quite right, and maybe, maybe find their doorway back home.


    Ok... Nice story. I've got logic problems with their Masquerade... It's like Dresden Files. Too many kids seem to disappear, for the Kidnapper argument to make sense:

    forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/dr...page-30#post-5604462

    Quick Notes on Inconsistencies [ Click to expand ]


    And now I'm gonna Trope this... tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/EveryHeartADoorway

    Hmm... Given Indexing, she's already thought about the issue, so I guess in the verse, she's got a Weirdness Censor solution like in Indexing? ... I guess EleanorXLundy is a couple? Avoiding Hide Your Gays...

    tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Indexing
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    Last Edit: 8 years 9 months ago by Malady.
    8 years 9 months ago - 8 years 9 months ago #3 by Schol-R-LEA
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    • One of the things to remember is that Seanan's writing, especially for October Daye, is heavily influenced by OWoD; she originally pitched the series to Kevin Andrew Murphy as a novel in the WoD Changeling series, and she contributed material for The Shining Host (the LARP version of the game) as well - she had had experience running Changeling NPCs as one of the Storytellers in the "Berkeley By Night" crossover campaign (she's an excellent GM, BTW), and in fact she first used the name "An Artificial Night" as the title of the 1996 part of that campaign. Fortunately, she was able to re-write the novels in a new form after White Wolf ditched OWoD, and from all accounts they were better for it (though ironically enough, I haven't read them; I had a copy of Rosemary and Rue that got lost - along with my copy of the Pretty Little Dead Girl CD - before I finished it, and haven't had the money to buy any since then).
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    Last Edit: 8 years 9 months ago by Schol-R-LEA.
    8 years 9 months ago #4 by Arcanist Lupus
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    • Malady, I think you might be overestimating how common this is. There are only two schools in all of North America, and Elanor West's Home only has 40 kids in it. It's unclear which school is bigger, and Elanor mentions that she only gets about 2/3s of the kids who could come to her school, but there's probably only 100-150 returnees who are still school aged, and that's over a span of several years. The statistics I found claim that the US gets over a million runaways each year. Even if only 1% of those are long term runaways, that's still over 100 times the number of kids who find doorways. And almost by definition, children who find doorways mostly come from families who don't listen to them.

    As far as Jack and Jill go, I don't think that their parents had two different ideas of the "perfect child". I think they had one concept of the "perfect pair of twins" .
    "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy." - Spider Robinson
    8 years 9 months ago #5 by Malady
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    • Arcanist Lupus wrote: Malady, I think you might be overestimating how common this is.


    Yeah.

    Hmm... I guess the Masquerade is helped by having that 'disorder' in the literature as a thing, so psychologists and others can say, "So, you say that she says she experienced 10 years subjective time in Tuatha Dé Danann? Well, that's XXXX disorder. Very rare, only two known experts in the country..."

    And then the girls are shipped off to Eleanor West's ... I guess.

    And the literature is made to hold up under close scrutiny and stuff, I guess?
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