Every Heart A Doorway

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death.

“The girls were never present for the entrance interviews. Only their parents, their guardians, their confused siblings, who wanted so much to help them but didn’t know how. It would have been too hard on the prospective students to sit there and listen as the people they loved most in all the world—all this world, at least—dismissed their memories as delusions, their experiences as fantasy, their lives as some intractable illness.”

McGuire uses punctuation to establish a professional, orderly tone in the novella’s opening lines while hinting at hidden truths. The dashes around “all this world, at least” break up the third sentence, which reflects how the children’s time in the portal worlds has disrupted their relationships with their families. The passage contains two lists, including the description of how the children’s loved ones “dismissed their memories as delusions, their experiences as fantasy, their lives as some intractable illness.” The list format sets a rational tone that clashes with and seeks to undermine the students’ fantastical experiences. This tension establishes the theme of familial expectations versus individual needs.

“Hearing the things she said would have only made it worse, as she sat there and explained, so earnestly, so sincerely, that her school would help to cure the things that had gone wrong in the minds of all those little lost lambs. She could take the broken children and make them whole again.”

The diction and repetition in the description “so earnestly, so sincerely” create a consoling tone that illustrates how Eleanor soothes the prospective families’ concerns. Similarly, the metaphor likening the children to “little lost lambs” sets a patronizing tone at odds with the headmistress’s true views. McGuire’s usage of words like “cure,” “broken,” and “whole” medicalizes the children’s experiences. This develops The Tension Between Familial Expectations and Individual Needs by showing how the children’s families can only conceptualize their transformative adventures as mental health conditions.