I read Every Heart a Doorway a while back and this book showed up in my recommended books. And then it took a year for me to get off the holds list at the library to actually check it out!
The story follows three perspectives, though I’m going to only focus on Roger and Dodger, two people who do not know that they are science experiments created to hold a large amount of power. They are twins separated at birth and find each other by communicating by a form of telepathy. As they grow older, they encounter one another, cause harm to their relationship, and then vanish from the other’s presence over and over again until they find that they have the power to destroy the world when they are together. Not only that, but because they are experiments, their maker now wants them destroyed in favour of another pair that is easier to control.
I ignore the third perspective, that of the mad scientist/alchemist named James Reed, because I felt like that was the weakest point for me. Where I understood what Roger and Dodger were doing and why they were acting the way they were, I had no idea what was going on with the motivations of Reed. There was a fairy tale that he was trying to make happen, but the fairy tale was an allegory but it wasn’t. There was a heavy fantasy element to it, but nothing happening with the other two perspectives had that fantastical fairy tale element to it that it lost me. It was too dissonant and felt like it was a completely different story.
But I did enjoy watching Roger and Dodger as they had a terrible time trying to get on the same page and they acted almost entirely based on their own incomplete contexts of the situation. Their inability to communicate properly didn’t feel forced for the plot or malicious, just the actions of people who don’t know better. And I always like that.
And I like the ideas behind it. This idea that two children are separated and then come together to realize that they can destroy the world together is great. That someone created them to see what they can do and when they get too powerful and incontrollable that they must be eliminated is great.1 I just… didn’t like anything to do with Reed.
Overall, I did like more than I disliked. It was a fun story with a lot of interesting ideas and execution. And if you like alchemy, this might be a great fit for you.
- Not exactly what happened, but how I could interpret it. [↩]