Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children

I LOVED this. My biggest complaint is that I wish it was about ten times longer.

“For us, places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children serves a unique purpose: it acts as a boarding school for children who have walked through a doorway into another world, and come back unable to adjust to the “real” world. These other worlds can be logical or fairy, good or evil, and a variety of other types. Eleanor West tries to help these children move on, all the while holding out the hope that their doors will open again. But when children start dying at the school, Eleanor and the students must discover who among them is a murderer.

It’s a beautiful little book, and the world that McGuire creates could fill hundreds of pages, rather than the 190 or so contained within its cover. Luckily, it appears she’s working on a sequel or two (according to Goodreads) — I’ll be first in line to read them!