Every Heart a Doorway

When this book first came out, everyone was raving about it. Well, everyone on the corners of the internet I frequent, which happen to include the author's blog. Still, the premise was interesting. A boarding school for kids who'd been whisked away to various fairy lands and then sent home and weren't sure how to deal with that. I'd been meaning to pick it up for a while, so when Tor offered a free download last month (to celebrate the release of the sequel), I jumped at it.

It wasn't entirely what I expected. Instead of teenagers learning to deal with childhood trauma and finding a community of other outsiders, McGuire presents a murder mystery. Which I should have seen coming from her. It's an interesting mystery (with a culprit so obvious that I was second-guessing myself), but I felt like it left some of the characters short-changed. Instead of watching the kids die off, I would have liked to get to know them better. But there will be more books, so perhaps this is incentive to check those out.

Mostly I liked this book, even if it felt too brief. That can be a problem with novellas. But I didn't care for the ending. I think it was trying to be a happy ending, but it felt a little hollow and contrived to me. I'm not really sure that will stop me from checking out the other books as I come across them, though.

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