Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is a sanctuary — a place that believes the children who fell through doors and came back should be helped to hope, not cured of their longing. But it is not the only school for such children. There is another, and it is neither kind nor safe.
At the Whitethorn Institute, the philosophy is the opposite of Eleanor West's: that the doors were a sickness, that magic must be forgotten, and that students must be remade into ordinary, obedient young people no matter the cost. When Cora — desperate to outrun the darkness clinging to her after her time beneath the waves — begs to transfer there in hope of a different destiny, she trades one world for a far more oppressive one, ruled by the icy Headmaster Whitethorn and his rigid regime.
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novella, Seanan McGuire's seventh Wayward Children book is a tense, angry, gothic story about institutions that "help" by erasing you, the solidarity of the students who resist, and the difference between being saved and being controlled.