You can’t really go home. It’s not a very happy or comfortable truth, but it is definitely a truth, and many people have recognized it as such. Once you leave what was home for you as a child or young person, you can come back to where you were and live there again, even permanently, but it isn’t the same.

Seanan McGuire gives this idea a unique perspective in her book “Every heart a doorway”. The book is fairly short and a quick read, but an engaging and thought-provoking one. The setting is a boarding school for those children who went “away” and then came back again – that is, children who went to places like Narnia, Oz, Wonderland, and so on, all the various alternative realities. But now they’ve come back, and found that home really isn’t home anymore, and they want to go back.

The story is poignant without being sentimental; the school councilors point out that the children went to their various alternate realities because here, at home, parents, teachers, friends and siblings didn’t really understand them, there was something inside that was hidden, suppressed, and calling out to be free. It was that hidden part that brought the door to the other world, or brought the child to the door, to let them go to a world where they were truly understood, and could truly be free.

And that’s the point of imaginary worlds, isn’t it? They are a refuge for those of us who feel misunderstood, or not entirely free to be ourselves. McGuire seems to understand this instinctively, and likely from first hand experience.

The book is definitely on my list of books I’m glad I read this year, it was a new perspective and a very old one, skilfully wrapped up together. I recommend it.