Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Recommended Reading: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

First off: I want to thank everyone for their comments on last week's blog entry.  I've thought for a long time that the book I'm working on was the sort of thing no one would want to read and it would never sell, but y'all have convinced me I was wrong on that first point.  ^_^  And that gives me hope for the second one as well.  ...which I'll worry about long after I've finished the damn thing (current word count: 71239), I swear.

Now, on to the important stuff.

It's not often that I love a book and think everyone I know should read it before I'm two chapters in.  Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway is one of those rare books.  This story got a hold of me and pulled me along right from the start, and for different reasons than the usual.

It wasn't that I wanted to live in this story, or to know the characters, or to experience all that they did.  It was that I felt like I already had.

Every Heart a Doorway has a simple yet elegant concept.  It's about a home for children who've been through doorways, gone to fantasy worlds, and returned to our world, to friends and family who thought they were kidnapped or dead or worse, and who now have to learn to live in this world again, where nothing seems to work right and everyone thinks they're crazy for talking about what they've experienced.  It's the heartbreaking aftermath of every portal fantasy where the main character goes home at the end.

I also can't help but wonder if it was inspired by this XKCD comic, but that's just me.

Most of the book's characters either are or appear young, and we get to see just how much going to all their different worlds has affected them.  There's a kind of beauty and sadness to everyone we meet and to all their stories, since all these people who went to all these different places want the same thing: to find their doorway again.  To go back.  The book truly captures that longing, and the difficulties of living in a world that just plain doesn't feel like home anymore.

There is a plot, and it's a fairly simple one; I figured it out partway through, and if I can figure out a book's plot while I'm reading it, then odds are good most anyone can.  But I did not care one bit that I knew what was going to happen.  I was too caught up in how the book felt to stop reading, and I was genuinely sad when it ended.

This is a short book, but it doesn't feel like it's too short.  It's exactly as long as it needs to be.

I know I'm projecting here, but I can't help feeling like this is a book for we writers.  It's for a lot of people, yes - it's for anyone who's ever felt out of place.  But it really feels like it's especially for us.  We live in our own worlds all the time, perhaps more than any other sort of artists, and that can make it incredibly hard to deal with the real world sometimes.  This book was a beautiful escape into a world where people understood, even if their experiences weren't the same.

This book gets us.  Which is why I think everyone should read it.

10 comments:

  1. That's a sad concept. Never thought about how it would feel to come back to the real world after living an adventure somewhere else.

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    1. It is sad, and the sadness is part of what makes the book as good as it is. The author does a very good job at drawing upon that longing to go back to the place that truly feels like home.

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  2. Sweet! Guess I'll be reading that one. I may even hand it off to the kidlets. Thanks for the recommendation!

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    1. Hope you like it. ^_^ I am glad that you said you'd read it first, though, as there are some gory parts in the book and in general it's *not* for kids.

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  3. That sounds like a heart-ripping surmise--a good one. I'm going to look into this one.

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    1. It hit me a lot harder than I thought it would, yes. Hope you like it if you give it a try.

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  4. Dude, I think that book would depress me. But I'm an odd one. I suppose I consider myself the doorway, not the person stepping through. I exist in both places at the same time but belong to neither. And I'm okay with that.

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    1. I hadn't thought about a person being the doorway, but considering the book's title, I think it does make sense.

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  5. This sounds like a good read. I went to Amazon and read the first page and I like the author's style. I might read this one.

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    1. I've read another book by her and it wasn't my thing, but the premise of this one was something I couldn't ignore. I'm really glad I gave it a chance. Hope you like it if you read it. ^_^

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