book review: Every Heart a Doorway

Seanan McGuire.
Every Heart a Doorway.
Tor. 2016

---

There are adventures to be had in fantasy lands. But what happens when you come back from Fairyland, or Narnia, or wherever? How do you readjust to Mundania? Can you readjust? Or will you break, fruitlessly searching for your lost life, your true home?

Eleanor West runs a boarding schools for those children who can’t readjust. Their parents think them damaged, or wayward, or mad. Eleanor knows better, having herself returned from a Netherworld. Most learn to cope, in the company of those who understand. A few, a very few, find their way back. But when new girl Nancy arrives, dark things start happening, and the school itself is threatened. Is Nancy the source, or the trigger, of these events?

Life After Fantasy has always struck me as an issue. The scene at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the Pevensie children return home after decades in Narnia, always horrified me: they had been adult royalty; how did they cope with being ordinary children again? Jo Walton tackles this issue in her wonderful short story, Relentlessly Mundane. Here Seanan McGuire tackles it differently, in a 170pp novella.

Despite wanting to go to Lewis’ Narnia (for the Talking Animals, if not for the sexism, racism, classism, bad theology, and shoddy plotting), and to Phillips’ Fairyland, I didn’t find myself attracted to any of the Netherworlds described by McGuire. (And I don’t think that’s just because there are no Pauline Baynes illustrations, or that I am half a century older than when I read the originals.) However, that lack of attraction is not a problem: it just serves to illustrate how everyone is different, and what is hearts-ease for one may be horror for another. But, consistently, Mundania is home for none.

This is not a typical school story, as it does not dwell on any lessons, except for some interesting Netherworld classification schemes. Nancy as new girl allows for some expository passages, but not that many. The tale focuses mainly on the deadly goings-on that threaten the school. And even there, we do not get a lot, since this is a novella. But McGuire does paint vivid pictures of the various main characters, and the very different homes they wish to return to. I wish this was a novel rather than a novella, and you can’t say fairer than that.

---

For all my book reviews, see my main website.

maps lie

Map data plots usually lie – here are several approaches to plotting the same geographical data.

Brexit, Bremain, the world did not end so dataviz people can throw shade and color

This is not the best way to show the data (depending what you want to show)

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

perfect

appropriate

Reality TV idea: We build a fake White House and put Trump in it and tell him he's president. Film the whole thing.

— Dan Kaszeta (@DanKaszeta) 1 August 2016

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

autodidact physicists

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on engaging with autodidacts (and why she doesn’t think of them as “crackpots” any more).

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

jokes mean things

Scalzi knocks it out of the park.

A person saying “it’s just a joke” isn’t always an asshole. But assholes are almost always happy to say “it’s just a joke” to make it look like the problem here is you. So when someone says “it’s just a joke” to you, that’s your cue for skepticism. Jokes mean things. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t understand the uses of humor, or is hoping that you don’t.

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

tattered and worn

I am definitely of the “books should be read/used” camp, but I don’t smash them up quite this much (and I cannot bring myself to write in them: PostIt notes solve that problem :-)

Bloggess : Sometimes tattered and worn = loved

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

red and green

Red-and-green era vintage Meccano, used to make a differential analyser. Cool! Unlike in many cases on the web, do read the comments, too!

My own Meccano set was of a later blue-and-yellow era, and a few of the pieces were even (shudder) plastic. And I too very much regret getting rid of mine – I had a number 9 set.

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page