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A review by aldoregan
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
2.0
“You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
Every Heart a Doorway had a really interesting concept, but didn’t deliver, sadly. I found it really difficult to connect with the story and the characters, and I read the book not really caring about what’s happening. I found myself more intrigued by what happened beyond the doors that they found rather than what happened after they got back to reality. This book could’ve been wonderful had it added something more.
Something that bothered me a lot throughout reading this though was the representation of diversity. It’s funny how I literally just saw a video discussing the representation of diversity in books and its problems. Here’s the thing: this book offered diversity, and yet delivered it so poorly. The video that I watched (which I’m gonna link down below) talked about how some authors write diverse characters like it’s a checkbox, thus not even giving them depth and complexity like how one would write a white heteronormative character. There’s a huge difference between an asexual character and a character who just happens to be asexual. The former’s character depends solely on their diversity (which in this case, being asexual), while the latter doesn’t, which means that the character’s asexuality does not define their entire being. Diversity is important in stories, whether its film or books or any other form of storytelling, because it represents the world that we live in today and it is also a way for us, the minority, to be represented. Yet businesses treat it like a marketing strategy because nowadays anything with diversity sells. However, not everything with diversity is good and it is important that we acknowledge that because it is a way for us to encourage writers to write diverse characters the way they would write any other character. Perhaps the lack of depth the characters in this book had had something to do with the shortness of the book. It read more like a short story rather than a full novel, therefore it didn’t give that much time for the characters to develop. Either way, I wish the characters were made to be more than their sexuality or their race and I wish them being diverse was not treated like it was a unique “trait” or that it was a “trait” at all.
video: https://youtu.be/zyvF4G6eDZ4
Every Heart a Doorway had a really interesting concept, but didn’t deliver, sadly. I found it really difficult to connect with the story and the characters, and I read the book not really caring about what’s happening. I found myself more intrigued by what happened beyond the doors that they found rather than what happened after they got back to reality. This book could’ve been wonderful had it added something more.
Something that bothered me a lot throughout reading this though was the representation of diversity. It’s funny how I literally just saw a video discussing the representation of diversity in books and its problems. Here’s the thing: this book offered diversity, and yet delivered it so poorly. The video that I watched (which I’m gonna link down below) talked about how some authors write diverse characters like it’s a checkbox, thus not even giving them depth and complexity like how one would write a white heteronormative character. There’s a huge difference between an asexual character and a character who just happens to be asexual. The former’s character depends solely on their diversity (which in this case, being asexual), while the latter doesn’t, which means that the character’s asexuality does not define their entire being. Diversity is important in stories, whether its film or books or any other form of storytelling, because it represents the world that we live in today and it is also a way for us, the minority, to be represented. Yet businesses treat it like a marketing strategy because nowadays anything with diversity sells. However, not everything with diversity is good and it is important that we acknowledge that because it is a way for us to encourage writers to write diverse characters the way they would write any other character. Perhaps the lack of depth the characters in this book had had something to do with the shortness of the book. It read more like a short story rather than a full novel, therefore it didn’t give that much time for the characters to develop. Either way, I wish the characters were made to be more than their sexuality or their race and I wish them being diverse was not treated like it was a unique “trait” or that it was a “trait” at all.
video: https://youtu.be/zyvF4G6eDZ4