Smorgasbord Fantasia

Seanan McGuire continues her marvellously magical exploration of the dark side of our fairy tales – Down among the sticks and bones is the accompanying novella to the first book, in the series Wayward Children . Sort of like an origin story to Jack and Jill, the twins from Every Heart a Doorway where we were first introduced to Eleanor West's School for the special kids. Kids who had tumbled down through rabbit-holes, whisked away into faraway magical worlds through doors that opened out into such. Kids who come back in our monotonous hum-drum of an everyday daily life and need to learn to adjust back. But some of them never do, because of the irresistible magical pull of the life beyond those doors, in these lush beautiful Hallways or scary dangerous Moors as it may be. Jack and Jill, or Jacqueline and Jillian as they are born – twins to indifferent unloving parents Chester and Melanie are raised up to conform to the ideals of their parents as trophy children – to co...

Seanan McGuire is a prolific author - and whatever genre her novels may be in, she always infuses elements of strange and the horrific in some subtle ways to make all the stories darkly hypnotic and compelling. Her books have a charm, in the sense that before you know it, you are already a quarter of a way into the story. And then before you realize it, you get sucked in deeper and then you are staying up, past bedtime to just race to the end point. Addictive, is to put it mildly. And so with Every Heart a Doorway - a strange little love letter to the nomad in all of us, that part of us that never belonged, to those who never felt happy with their ties to their worldly possessions weighing them down - Seanan transports us to the boarding school of Eleanor West, who looks after those 'special' children who have tumbled through doors into different other worlds (like the Moors of blood-sucking monsters, the market of goblins, dancing skeletons) around us but for some ine...