Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire
Oct. 23rd, 2017 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8OH BOY this book.
I read it for book club and then I managed to miss book club (it was Monday! On Tuesday, I looked at my email again....) and I have feelings about it. And by feelings, I mean I pretty much hated it by the end.
The book's premise is that it's set at a boarding school for the children who have gone through the portals of Fantasyland and then been spat back out. The way the Pensevie children grow up, become kings and queens, and then tumble back out of the wardrobe as children again - that's always been a bit of a weird cognitive dissonance for me, because while on one hand, it's great for the story for them to achieve those prophecies and rule a great kingdom and all. On the other hand, I can't imagine going an adult right back to a child and not having major issues. If right now I went back to being eight, keeping those memories, I'd be so messed up! And I don't even rule a kingdom.
The story's told through the perspective of a newly-returned girl, who went to a kingdom of the dead. Silent, unmoving, black. Six months pass in the real world, but much longer in the other world, and she's unsurprisingly pretty different when she comes back. Her parents, concerned, send her to Miss Eleanor West's boarding school.
Let's start with...oh god, let's start with the lecturing. I'm not here to read about Great Social Issues, and I'm ESPECIALLY not here to read about them in a tumblr-speak format. I. Can't. Stand. That. It's more acceptable if it's something that's modern, 2017, teen/YA fiction about actual teenagers. I'm not reading fantasy for that though. I am not reading fantasy to get mundane setting and context. Portal fantasy just has and evokes a different atmosphere, and to have it collide head-on with modern speech and expected norms doesn't work unless you do it really well. McGuire does not do it well. She does that thing where there's an asexual character, and that asexual character carefully explains to someone else what asexuality is. Yes, let's bring the narrative to a screeching halt so we can read a clumsily inserted infodump! The tumblr style is an additional irritant.
This would be easier to take if the characters were more than little constructs to demonstrate the various directions that fantasy worlds can take, and then murder victims. And the world building, which saves more books than I can count, didn't come in at all. McGuire divides up the worlds by plotting them on a few axes, which personally I pictured as intersecting - high/low and nonsense/logic, wickedness/virtue etc. Sumi, our protagonist Nancy's roommate, came back from a nonsense world, and characterization for that is that she's lolrandom and irreverent, and sometimes sad about it. Then she gets murdered, but not long enough after to let us actually get an attachment to her, so she's just another statistic.
Look, I said this about Joe Abercrombie and I'll say it again - a book with this much maiming and murder should not be boring. Is it boring? You have done something so so wrong! There were so many deaths! A murderer was lurking round any corner! (Why does the administration not do anything??) Why isn't there any suspense?
It's partly because I don't really care about any of the character, except maybe Lundy, who's their therapist, and she gets killed pretty quick. Tip: either go all out and make us care, or else go full Golden Age detective and just have a body be a body, and flesh out everything else. But the murder mystery isn't even interesting!
And oh, the protagonist. Frankly, I sympathized with her parents. And with most of the children's parents. While the children were having a great time in fantasyworld of whatever flavour they ended up in, their parents thought their children were kidnapped or dead or whatever. Nancy was away for months! Of course they should be overjoyed that she's alive and seemingly unharmed, of course they should be afraid that this sudden change might be symptomatic of something she's suffered during that unknown six months. Yes, Nancy, you're hurting, but would it kill you employ a little bit of empathy?
There's a mention of an opposite school, for kids who simply never want to go back to their worlds again, and want to forget. This is the school for those who desperately want to go back, and frankly it's hard to feel for Nancy when you're already irritated she's so mopey all the time and the thing she's so mopey about has no charm, no allure to at all. She stands still in the halls of the dead and she's hopelessly in love with the lord down there. That's a sketch of a world. Not enough to support nearly the amount of moping that Nancy does about it. Nostalgia is a very powerful engine for stuff like this, and McGuire could have spun a much stronger story if I actually felt sympathetic to Nancy's desire to go back. But I don't, because the concept's old and done before (pomegrantes again, you're name-checking concepts to try to give your book some associations that actually have weight, but you're attaching ballast to a sheet of paper that's the plot and character.)
The school's supposed to be "to help them move on", except I don't see anything of that - and then at the end, deus ex machina or actually not even ex machina, a door suddenly opens up! For no apparent reason! OK, it's not because of no reason. It's because she said "Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me." What?! Not only does this ruin all the build-up by letting the protagonist suddenly get all her dreams cause now the book needs to end, it's totally unsatisfying. I was interested in how she would interact with the rest of the world. She just gets to go back (undoing any work she did, leaving all her friends at the boarding school, not saying anything to her parents again) and...that's it! Fin!
This is the note that triggers it:
Arrghh. This is a message that should come out of the whole story, a theme elaborated on in the prose - an infinitely subtler message, not this cringey bald statement. This reminds me of horrific schooldays poetry. The only saving virtue is that it was written by a teenager, but it barely feels like Sumi.
3/10 because I also read Walden this year. Walden deserves 0/10, possibly lower than that. But yeah. I did not like this, do not recommend. You want portal fantasy? Don't even bother.
ETA: I just made myself mad by reading reviews. You know what a resilient heroine looks like for kids who were weird and didn't fit in? Growing up, trying, sometimes failing, making a space for themselves. NOT AN ENDING WHERE BAM, PERFECT WORLD DROPPED IN THEIR LAP! What an utterly stupid statement. What's emotional payoff, what's character arc, what's "creating a gothic world" (haha except no because we see none of it)? Argh!
I read it for book club and then I managed to miss book club (it was Monday! On Tuesday, I looked at my email again....) and I have feelings about it. And by feelings, I mean I pretty much hated it by the end.
The book's premise is that it's set at a boarding school for the children who have gone through the portals of Fantasyland and then been spat back out. The way the Pensevie children grow up, become kings and queens, and then tumble back out of the wardrobe as children again - that's always been a bit of a weird cognitive dissonance for me, because while on one hand, it's great for the story for them to achieve those prophecies and rule a great kingdom and all. On the other hand, I can't imagine going an adult right back to a child and not having major issues. If right now I went back to being eight, keeping those memories, I'd be so messed up! And I don't even rule a kingdom.
The story's told through the perspective of a newly-returned girl, who went to a kingdom of the dead. Silent, unmoving, black. Six months pass in the real world, but much longer in the other world, and she's unsurprisingly pretty different when she comes back. Her parents, concerned, send her to Miss Eleanor West's boarding school.
Let's start with...oh god, let's start with the lecturing. I'm not here to read about Great Social Issues, and I'm ESPECIALLY not here to read about them in a tumblr-speak format. I. Can't. Stand. That. It's more acceptable if it's something that's modern, 2017, teen/YA fiction about actual teenagers. I'm not reading fantasy for that though. I am not reading fantasy to get mundane setting and context. Portal fantasy just has and evokes a different atmosphere, and to have it collide head-on with modern speech and expected norms doesn't work unless you do it really well. McGuire does not do it well. She does that thing where there's an asexual character, and that asexual character carefully explains to someone else what asexuality is. Yes, let's bring the narrative to a screeching halt so we can read a clumsily inserted infodump! The tumblr style is an additional irritant.
This would be easier to take if the characters were more than little constructs to demonstrate the various directions that fantasy worlds can take, and then murder victims. And the world building, which saves more books than I can count, didn't come in at all. McGuire divides up the worlds by plotting them on a few axes, which personally I pictured as intersecting - high/low and nonsense/logic, wickedness/virtue etc. Sumi, our protagonist Nancy's roommate, came back from a nonsense world, and characterization for that is that she's lolrandom and irreverent, and sometimes sad about it. Then she gets murdered, but not long enough after to let us actually get an attachment to her, so she's just another statistic.
Look, I said this about Joe Abercrombie and I'll say it again - a book with this much maiming and murder should not be boring. Is it boring? You have done something so so wrong! There were so many deaths! A murderer was lurking round any corner! (Why does the administration not do anything??) Why isn't there any suspense?
It's partly because I don't really care about any of the character, except maybe Lundy, who's their therapist, and she gets killed pretty quick. Tip: either go all out and make us care, or else go full Golden Age detective and just have a body be a body, and flesh out everything else. But the murder mystery isn't even interesting!
And oh, the protagonist. Frankly, I sympathized with her parents. And with most of the children's parents. While the children were having a great time in fantasyworld of whatever flavour they ended up in, their parents thought their children were kidnapped or dead or whatever. Nancy was away for months! Of course they should be overjoyed that she's alive and seemingly unharmed, of course they should be afraid that this sudden change might be symptomatic of something she's suffered during that unknown six months. Yes, Nancy, you're hurting, but would it kill you employ a little bit of empathy?
There's a mention of an opposite school, for kids who simply never want to go back to their worlds again, and want to forget. This is the school for those who desperately want to go back, and frankly it's hard to feel for Nancy when you're already irritated she's so mopey all the time and the thing she's so mopey about has no charm, no allure to at all. She stands still in the halls of the dead and she's hopelessly in love with the lord down there. That's a sketch of a world. Not enough to support nearly the amount of moping that Nancy does about it. Nostalgia is a very powerful engine for stuff like this, and McGuire could have spun a much stronger story if I actually felt sympathetic to Nancy's desire to go back. But I don't, because the concept's old and done before (pomegrantes again, you're name-checking concepts to try to give your book some associations that actually have weight, but you're attaching ballast to a sheet of paper that's the plot and character.)
The school's supposed to be "to help them move on", except I don't see anything of that - and then at the end, deus ex machina or actually not even ex machina, a door suddenly opens up! For no apparent reason! OK, it's not because of no reason. It's because she said "Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me." What?! Not only does this ruin all the build-up by letting the protagonist suddenly get all her dreams cause now the book needs to end, it's totally unsatisfying. I was interested in how she would interact with the rest of the world. She just gets to go back (undoing any work she did, leaving all her friends at the boarding school, not saying anything to her parents again) and...that's it! Fin!
This is the note that triggers it:
You’re nobody’s rainbow.
You’re nobody’s princess.
You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.
Arrghh. This is a message that should come out of the whole story, a theme elaborated on in the prose - an infinitely subtler message, not this cringey bald statement. This reminds me of horrific schooldays poetry. The only saving virtue is that it was written by a teenager, but it barely feels like Sumi.
3/10 because I also read Walden this year. Walden deserves 0/10, possibly lower than that. But yeah. I did not like this, do not recommend. You want portal fantasy? Don't even bother.
ETA: I just made myself mad by reading reviews. You know what a resilient heroine looks like for kids who were weird and didn't fit in? Growing up, trying, sometimes failing, making a space for themselves. NOT AN ENDING WHERE BAM, PERFECT WORLD DROPPED IN THEIR LAP! What an utterly stupid statement. What's emotional payoff, what's character arc, what's "creating a gothic world" (haha except no because we see none of it)? Argh!
