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emvdw 's review for:

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
3.5

To be honest, I was a bit dissapointed by this. The premise is great, but the execution a bit mediocre. The MC has very little personality (beside wanting to go back through her door, but almost all the characters share that personality trait). The political/ideological messaging/social commentary was also a bit on the nose. 

I love the representation, but to me it did not feel like this was brought up organically. You meet a character and they go "HI, BTW I'M TRANS" or "DID YOU KNOW I WAS ACE???" without any context or very little prompting. I recognise that there's a (probably tricky) balance in shorter lengths stories and totally get that authors choose to have unambiguous, clear, canonical representation (instead of the pandering "Oh, yeah Dumbledore was totally GAY all this time" type ret-con), but for me it felt very forced. 

Similarly, with the world-building, there is a lot of exposition through dialogue, which is not really my favourite, it feels a bit forced again. The resolution to the mystery was also a little obvious to me. I did still have fun reading this :).