Seanan McGuire is fast making a name for herself, and some of that reputation is deserved. Her writing oozes style, and she has a clever hand mixing old tropes and current concerns. But McGuire needs to pay attention to the basics.

Welcome to world of fantasy and terrible loss. In this world, much like our own, children sometimes step through doors to Other Places, where many of them experience a reality more vivid and right then our own. But these doors are ephemeral things, and the children who return to our world are alien to their family, seeking after something them might never regain. There is a secret school for these children, a place of healing and knowledge where they might come to grips with their strange experience. Nancy is one such girl. She spent a long time in the Halls of the Dead, where she learned statue stillness and the sweetness of pomegranate juice, and where her hair turned white, and she wishes to go back. Her parents want her to be normal. So the school.

Nancy is confused by the vocabulary of the school, the dimensions that map out the many Other Places children have been, (Nonsense, Logic, Virtue, Wicked, Rhyme...), but she begins making friends. Sumi wants to go back to a place called Confection. Kade is from Oklahoma, and went to a world of violent adventure a girl and came back a prince. The twins Jack and Jill wound up in a gothic horror of vampire masters and mad doctors. There's some nice bits of contemporary reality for young adults. Kade is trans, Nancy is asexual, Sumi talks about masturbation, but we don't have much time to settle in before students start dying. What was a place of refuge is becoming a deathtrap, and no one seems to be able to stop it.

And spoilers, it turns out that Jill is killing the other students to make a perfect girl to open the door back to her fantasy. Jack kills her sister, and she goes home. Nancy goes back to her family, realizes that no one gets to tell her story, and returns to her land of the dead.

But here's the thing. What separates an anecdote from a story is that in a story, a protagonist faces conflict and makes a decision that reveals their character. Nancy does not. She goes places, meets people, and comes out unchanged, all in a straight line. Admittedly, it's a lush and imaginative straight line, but it's not a story. It's a series of scenes. Storytelling 101, folks.