A review by arf88
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

2.0

A very easy and short ya fantasy read. An interesting idea, with shallow characters and motivations and simple, if overwritten, prose. The sort of popcorn book you can shut your brain off for while on the beach. For that reason, I'll likely pick up more in the series, but the book itself annoyed me in several parts.

There's this weird "progressive" sexism in this book, along with a twee and pretentious writing style, that has me thinking the author probably spent a lot of time on tumblr.

There was also a lot of sinister undertones that I'm not entirely sure were supposed to be there.

Spoiler

A school that lies to parents about the health of their children (not even telling them if they've died!), and insists they can never understand, and a happy ending that has a girl standing still eating nothing but juice for all eternity.

If the target demographic was slightly different, I would be assuming this was all intentional with some sort of payoff in the future books. But knowing how shallow the morality of YA is currently required to be so as to avoid the wrath of twitter, I'm thinking we're supposed to take it all at face value.