Every Heart a Doorway

Eleanor West runs a very particular boarding school. Its students are the children who fell through a door — into a candy-colored Nonsense world, a rigorous Logic world, a moor ruled by vampires, or the still Halls of the Dead — lived whole lives there, and were then cast back to a "real" world that feels wrong to them ever after. Eleanor's home is a place to recover, and to nurse the secret hope of finding one's door again.

Nancy is the newest arrival, returned from an underworld of stillness and pomegranates, and struggling to explain herself to parents who want their bright, bubbly daughter back. Just as she begins to find kinship among the other students — pragmatic Kade, morbid twins Jack and Jill, sweet skeleton-loving Christopher — a brutal murder shatters the school's peace. As suspicion and fear spread, Nancy and her new friends must find the killer before the sanctuary that finally understands them is destroyed.

Seanan McGuire's award-winning novella opens the Wayward Children series with a tender, melancholy, and quietly subversive portrait of misfit children, grief, and belonging — notable for its matter-of-fact inclusion of asexual and transgender characters.