Every Heart a Doorway

I loved the setting and the concept of this book – the idea that the thousands of stories of children going to another world and then coming back either like no time had passed, or like years and years had passed in a day are all true. And then exploring what happens, psychologically to those kids. I always love it when a book takes a well-known trope and turns it on its head by asking the questions we all should have been, but took for granted. I also really like books that exist in a dialogue with other books and only really make sense to prolific readers.

Multiple people recommended this to me, and one of them talked mostly about how the main character actively sought to understand and develop empathy for people who were different from her. I don't appreciate that theme as much as she did, but I did like that there was a co-mingling of characters from a bunch of different genres and an exploration of how that works, and how it works if two people both went to The Underworld but it wasn't the same.

Where this fell down for me was the plot. The murder mystery just wasn't super compelling and I felt like the social contract of the book was broken twice, which really broke the metafictional spell for me. The first was when magic turned out to work all along in the real world, when the boy played his bone flute and then again when it turned out that Jack would be capable of resurrecting Jill, kind of making the whole murder mystery thing a little shallow.

Overall, though, I found this a beautiful and atmospheric novella.