Figgy O'Connell

"We went down the mysterious stairs that couldn't possibly be there, of course. Who wouldn't go down an impossible staircase in the bottom of a trunk? We were twelve. We were curious, and angry with our parents, and angry with each other."

We all know about portal magic. We've grown up reading books or watching movies about gateways to other worlds. Alice Liddell, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, Terisa Morgan, Ofelia, and the four Pevensie children found doorways into other worlds. Doorways to Wonderland, and Cittàgazze, and Mordant, and Pan's Labyrinth, and Narnia.

What if these journeys had all really happened?  Well, okay, maybe not Narnia:

"What about, like, Narnia?" asked Christopher. "Those kids went through all sorts of different doors, and they always wound up back with the big talking lion."
"That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C. S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up. That's what all those author's did. They made shit up, and people made them famous. We tell the truth, and our parents throw us into this glorified loony bin."

But what if the rest were real, and countless others besides? How would those kids who came back deal with the sudden reality shock? More importantly, how would their parents deal when their kids, newly back from being "kidnapped", refused to let the fantasy die?
This is where Eleanor West, with her home for wayward children comes in.

To the parents, she said, "This is a delusion, and some time away will help to cure it."
To the aunts and uncles, she said, "This is not your fault, and I can be the solution."
To the grandparents, she said, "Let me help. Please, let me help you."

Eleanor knows it's not a delusion, has, in fact, found her own door into another world and travelled through it countless times. Now she helps the children who find themselves stuck in this world, unable to return to the places that made so much more sense for them.

"Vampires?" said Nancy blankly, "Those aren't real."
"None of this is real, my dear. Not this house, not this conversation, not those shoes you're wearing and not either one of us. 'Real' is a four-letter word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof."

The rest of this review can be found HERE!