3/5 stars
Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks & Bones, and Come Tumbling Down, by Seannan McGuire (2016, 2017, 2020)
There are actually 10 books in this series, but I've only read these three - and they aren't even the first three! They're numbers one, two, and five. I did attempt one of the others, and didn't like it... but I'll get to that later. These three I liked a lot!
Every Heart a Doorway
"Before I went through that doorway, I knew there was no such thing as a portal to another world. Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong."
As the first in the series, this book sets the tone and develops the world and its rules well, and introduces the majority of the main characters in the other books - those characters being the students at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. The home/school is for those children who have visited another land - the Alices and Dorothys and Narnia kids - and returned back to ours. I won't say returned "home," because most of these kids feel much more at home now in their fantasy lands. These lands vary wildly from light and fun, sugar-filled places, to fairy or goblin lands, to lands of death and vampires. There are "nonsense" worlds (think Alice's Wonderland), logical worlds, and many grey areas in between.
For various reasons, these children have returned to this world, and, of course, no one believes their tales. No one but Eleanor West, who also has another land she wants to go back to. So, what happens when these kinds of adventurers return to the mundane reality of their birth-home?
The story opens with Nancy's arrival. Nancy lived in an underworld land-of-the-dead, where she learned the importance of quiet, and complete stillness. She rooms with a girl named Sumi, who comes from a manic, hyperactive, candy land and has never stayed still a moment in her life. Kade visited a fairy land, and defeated a goblin king. Christopher stayed in a different kind of land of the dead, where everyone was a skeleton. And identical twin sisters Jack and Jill, lived with vampires. They all get along relatively well, despite coming from such different worlds, their deep and profound yearning for their chosen-homes, and their grief at having been shut out of them...
That is, until students start turning up dead at the school. Not just dead, but brutally murdered, with parts of their bodies removed. Eleanor and the children are in a race against time to solve these murders to keep more children from being killed.
It's a murder mystery set at a school for offbeat, sometimes creepy, children with completely unique origin stories. It's atmospheric, odd, and quite funny at times. I loved the diversity of the characters - not just their backstories, but sexual identity, gender, and race as well.
I also love love loved this quote from one of the teachers at the school. When asked why there are so many more girls than boys at the Home, Lundy responds:
"Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”
Down Among the Sticks & Bones
This is the second book in the series, and tells the origin story of Jack and Jill - their parents, how they grew up, how they found their way to their fantasy world at 12 years old, and what happened when they got there.
Come Tumbling Down
This is book number five, but I really just wanted to keep following Jack & Jill, so I skipped over three & four to read this one!
Come Tumbling Down picks up with Jack and Jill where we left them at the end of book one. I won't say too much, since I don't want anything to be spoiled for new readers. But the short, non-spoilery version is that they go back to their fantasy land, a lot of terrible things happen, and one of them has to return to the school to enlist the others to help her save her world.
Beneath the Sugar Sky
This is book number three and I started it, but wasn't enjoying it. This is Sumi's story, and takes the kids into her sugary Candy Land. I didn't like it there and I didn't really care for the new characters that lived there.
But if you get into this series, there's lots of places to go with it! I may still read more of the series, since there are seven that I haven't read, that all follow different characters (either origin stories, or what-happens-next stories).
UP NEXT: The Secret Book of Flora Lea, by Patti Callahan Henry
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