Every Heart a Doorway Book Review
Nov. 7th, 2020 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arias_hollowI recently read Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire for the Ace Readathon that was hosted on Twitter during October. It is the first in a series, which I knew going in, so I didn't expect every single thing to be perfectly resolved. It was a relatively short book about a group of teens who all wish they could go back to the fantasy worlds they went to as kids trying to solve a murder in their new school/home. Overall, I had somewhat mixed feelings on the book, as I enjoyed certain elements quite a bit, but also clearly had the wrong expectations of the kind of book it was going to be, because I kept trying to figure out what was supposed to be the Central aspect of the book and seeing how everything was supposed to fit together thematically, which definitely made feeling invested more challenging.
Our main character, Nancy, went to an Underworld where servants of the court had to stay still as statues, and she and the prince (?) had some kind of relationship that Nancy thought was romance I guess. The diversity of the fantasy worlds the different kids went to was pretty interesting, but it actually wasn't explored much or focused on. Which leads me to one of my first critiques of the books - everyone seemed to have some kind of stockholm like need to return to their fantasy worlds, even though almost all of them sounded like terrible places to live, ones where any story actually set in that world would be about criticizing it in some way. And that's just...never questioned. Up until the end, that's what the characters want, and I felt weird about the implication I was supposed to be rooting for them somehow in this endeavor.
But that was really more of a b plot, or really just background context. The core of the story was the murder mystery. On its own, I did think it was a well done murder mystery. The clues were gruesome but interesting, and I didn't guess the culprit until it was revealed. And the writing style was pretty vivid and easy to follow, so that was good too. But I didn't really see the point of the mystery when there was all this character building potential in the background - and if the mystery was going to be the focus, why have these character building scenes scattered about in the first place? They didn't actually lead anywhere, and had no impact on the mystery.
So, while I did enjoy the book, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had understood its purpose from the beginning a lot better. Because as it, I'm still not entirely sure what the purpose was. The excerpt of the second book only made that more confusing - it seems to be a prequel about two characters who pretty much left the entire main setting at the end of book one. That said, it also looked interesting, so I may yet read it anyways. And I'd definitely be curious to read more of the author's work to see what some of her other stories are like.
Our main character, Nancy, went to an Underworld where servants of the court had to stay still as statues, and she and the prince (?) had some kind of relationship that Nancy thought was romance I guess. The diversity of the fantasy worlds the different kids went to was pretty interesting, but it actually wasn't explored much or focused on. Which leads me to one of my first critiques of the books - everyone seemed to have some kind of stockholm like need to return to their fantasy worlds, even though almost all of them sounded like terrible places to live, ones where any story actually set in that world would be about criticizing it in some way. And that's just...never questioned. Up until the end, that's what the characters want, and I felt weird about the implication I was supposed to be rooting for them somehow in this endeavor.
But that was really more of a b plot, or really just background context. The core of the story was the murder mystery. On its own, I did think it was a well done murder mystery. The clues were gruesome but interesting, and I didn't guess the culprit until it was revealed. And the writing style was pretty vivid and easy to follow, so that was good too. But I didn't really see the point of the mystery when there was all this character building potential in the background - and if the mystery was going to be the focus, why have these character building scenes scattered about in the first place? They didn't actually lead anywhere, and had no impact on the mystery.
So, while I did enjoy the book, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had understood its purpose from the beginning a lot better. Because as it, I'm still not entirely sure what the purpose was. The excerpt of the second book only made that more confusing - it seems to be a prequel about two characters who pretty much left the entire main setting at the end of book one. That said, it also looked interesting, so I may yet read it anyways. And I'd definitely be curious to read more of the author's work to see what some of her other stories are like.
