Every Heart is a Doorway

“Every Heart a Doorway” is a book, and it is also a devious
and calculated torture method for alterhumans.

If you are someone who experiences the feeling of “this earth is not my world. I come from
another, stranger land that is my home. I remember it, I can practically feel
it, but no one else believes its anything other than a fantasy” this book
will take that feeling and beat you about the head and shoulders with it.

As someone from another world, reading a paragraph of this
book feels like the little mermaid feeling knives with her every step on land.
I have cried 3 or 4 times and I am on page 48.

Specifically, Every Heart is a Doorway is a book about
children like Dorothy, or Alice, or Wendy and her brothers, or the Pevensie children who travel to, and
make their home in another world, only to find themselves back on earth with no
way to get home. The book is about a school for these children.

For those keeping sore there’s also a POC among the main
characters and someone who’s canonically trans. (ftm) Oh and the main character identifies herself as asexual.

Here are some quotes from the book so far (no spoilers,
because I’m hardly on chapter three)

THE GIRLS WERE NEVER present
for the entrance interviews. Only their parents, their guardians, their
confused siblings, who wanted so much to help them but didn’t know how. It
would have been too hard on the prospective students to sit there and listen as
the people they loved most in all the world—all this world, at least—dismissed
their memories as delusions, their experiences as fantasy, their lives as some
intractable illness.

At least while
they were with her, they would be with someone who understood. Even if they
would never have the opportunity to go back home, they would have someone who
understood, and the company of their peers, which was a treasure beyond
reckoning.

Eleanor West spent
her days giving them what she had never had, and hoped that someday, it would
be enough to pay her passage back to the place where she belonged.

“You
can’t put a Nonsense traveler in with someone who went walking through Logic,
not unless you feel like explaining a remarkable amount of violence to the
local police.” 

Because she had wanted to know what was at the end of the
long path between the trees, and because she hadn’t wanted to turn back before
she understood everything. Because for the first time in forever, she’d felt
like she was going home, and that feeling had been enough to move her feet,
slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, until she had been running
through the clean night air, and nothing else had mattered, or would ever
matter again—

“I don’t dye my hair!” Nancy’s protest was heated. Sumi stopped talking and blinked at her. Eleanor turned to look at her. Nancy’s cheeks grew hot as the blood rose in her face, but she stood her ground, somehow keeping herself from reaching up to stroke her hair as she said, “It used to be all black, like my mother’s. When I danced with the Lord of the Dead for the first time, he said it was beautiful, and he ran his fingers through it. All the hair turned white around them, out of jealousy. That’s why I only have five black streaks left. Those are the parts he touched.”

“ Hope
means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you
bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left.”

“ I guess I should tell you I’m taken,” said Sumi breezily. “He’s a candy corn farmer from the far reaches of the Kingdom and my one true love, and we’re going to get married someday. Or we would have, if I hadn’t gone and gotten myself exiled. Now he’ll tend his fields alone, and I’ll grow up and decide that he was just a dream, and maybe one day my daughter’s daughter will visit his grave with licorice flowers and a prayer for the departed on her lips.” 

I will probably do a full review of this book if I manage to read all of it without expiring dramatically next to my still beating heart.