Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Tor Books; $17.99 tpb; 173 pages
Seanan McGuire has quite possibly achieved the greatest success of the current generation of urban fantasists. Her October Day and InCryptid novels sell like things that sell really well. Yet, somehow, I have read only one book by her in the past, a standalone—largely because of a fear of getting hooked on Yet Another Series. They take time, they do.
Well, I was reasonably impressed by that one book, so I was pleased to be given the opportunity to review this one and even more pleased now that I’ve read it.
Every Heart stirs a pot somewhere in the vicinity of Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy and Jo Walton’s Among Others: this is a book for people who have fallen in love with a fantasy world.
There is a special school for children who have been to fantasy worlds and come back. (Actually, there are two, but the other is only mentioned, never seen.) Here the children cope with having come back to the mundane world when they have come to think of the Other Place as more home than the one they were born in. Children, you see, are drawn to worlds that match them in some way—a mutual need is met.
Our (main) protagonist is Nancy, who has just returned from a timeless time in the Halls of the Dead and wants nothing more than to return. Her parents are worried: after being missing for six months, she stands strangely still, she talks little, she eats little, and she dresses solely in black and white. So they send her to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a school, they are told, that specializes in children who suffer from this kind of delusion.
West’s is no Hogwarts or Brakebills. It teaches children to live in the world they have been exiled into while retaining the faint hope of return to their various fantasy worlds. Miss West classifies these worlds on axes of High Logic and High Nonsense, Virtue and Wickedness, and many other categories; the various aspects cross each other. One child has been to Faerie, another to Goblin Market, and so on.
Shortly after Nancy’s arrival at Miss West’s school, her roommate is killed and her hands taken. Suspicions fly, and Nancy is one of the prime suspects. Another is Jack, who spent her Elsewhere time helping a “scientist” raise dead bodies and body parts.
It’s a fascinating story with fascinating ideas, but what really fascinates is the language. McGuire writes sentences that bring me near to tears:
[in the Halls of the Dead there] had been banquets, yes, feasts that lasted weeks, with the tables groaning under the weight of fruits and wines and dark, rich desserts. She had tasted unicorn at one of those feasts, and gone to her bed with a mouth that still tingled from the delicate venom of the horse-like creature’s sweetened flesh. But mostly, there had been the silver cups of pomegranate juice, and the feeling of an empty stomach adding weight to her stillness. Hunger had died quickly in the Underworld. It was unnecessary, and a small price to pay for the quiet, and the peace, and the dances; for everything she’d so fervently enjoyed.
A world where such sentences exist and make sense is a world I loved visiting. I had not previously thought of McGuire as a stylist; this book was then a revelation to me.
Also: it’s short, so there’s no excuse not to read it. Go thou and do likewise. 
Dan’l Danehy-Oakes lives in Alameda, California.
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