Every now and then I find a book that just gets me, that illuminates some part of my identity or experiences that I’ve felt alone in having, and welcomes me into a community of...survivors isn’t always the right word, but people who share my identity and have had similar experiences because of it. I’ve been finding more and more of them recently: Shira Glassman creates worlds where my Jewish heritage and traditions are the norm, while Rose Lerner and Ruthanna Emrys put those traditions and my own family history into historical context. Kaia Sonderby captures the feeling of being the only neuroatypical person in a room. And even Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden series (previously) is full of bisexual math nerds and characters all over the autism spectrum.
Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway represents a part of me I’ve never seen in a novel before. It’s a story about people who feel more at home in fictional worlds than in their own. Where so many young adult fantasy novels feature teenagers thrust into fantasy worlds, finding themselves suddenly important and needing to save that world from some threat, this book is about what happens after those teenagers have gone home, closed the book as it were, and found themselves unable to settle back in on Earth.
It’s not a happy story by any means—it’s about people, mostly girls, mostly teens, who have given up on being misfits on Earth, are slowly giving up on ever finding their way back to the deadly magical realms tailored to their own unique personalities and abilities where they actually felt like they mattered, and have developed what we on Earth see as unhealthy coping abilities for survival in their own worlds. Nancy has an eating disorder because she’d lived in the Halls of the Dead, where food is nearly unnecessary. Jack and her twin sister Jill are psychopaths because they’d gone to a horror movie setting, one apprenticed to a vampire, the other to a mad scientist. (The sequel, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, elaborates on their backstory.) Even the relatively normal ones can’t go home again, in either sense: Kade discovered that he was trans during his time in Fairyland, and was rejected by both the fairies and his human parents for not being the girl they expected him to be. And Eleanor, who runs the boarding school at which the book is set, is a sprightly ninety years old and awaiting the day she becomes senile enough to return to the Land of Nonsense. And this is all before one of the students becomes desperate enough to get back to their own world that she starts murdering her peers.
Every Heart a Doorway is full of the kind of dark detail I usually try to avoid in the novels I read to relax. But I couldn’t stop reading, because it just gets me in a way no other book ever has. By the halfway point I’d already decided what “my world” was—which fictional universe from my childhood drew me in as completely as if I’d opened a door and walked there, and made me feel like I, as an alienated preteen with a habit of retreating from the world into fiction, was someone that mattered. (Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels, in case you were wondering. I loved Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl with equal intensity at about the same time, but never really felt like I fit in in either story or the societies they were set in. On Pern, any girl could become a Weyrwoman.)
I could say there’s something pathethic about the way Eleanor and her students refuse to give up on going back. How, at ages as young as thirteen, they’ve decided there’s nothing to strive for on Earth and their only need is to return to the fantasies of their childhoods. But if I’m going to do that, I’d also have to say there’s something pathetic about how eager I was to make long-distance friends on Facebook and Tumblr in in high school and college, and Twitch and Mastodon during and since grad school. And I’m not gonna do that, because 1) I am determined not to be pathetic and 2) American society has a history of pathologizing young women’s imaginations and disregarding their life experiences, which is why these girls’ parents keep sending them to boarding school to be cured of their delusions.
And Eleanor, instead of curing her students, confirms that their experiences are real and that they are not alone in not fitting in. She basically builds Tumblr in real life. And that’s why I feel so comfortable in this book, even around its teenage psychopaths, and why I felt sad at the end when Nancy gets her happy ending and returns to the Halls of the Dead. Like many of Eleanor’s students and faculty, I’ve given up on going back to Pern. It’s got problems with gender roles and representation of LGBT+ people that make the books uncomfortable to reread. But now, on Tumblr and Mastodon, I can spend time with other people who have been there. And knowing I’m not alone in having gone and come back makes Earth feel more like home.
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