Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home. The Halls of the Dead is a sort of afterlife reminiscent of Hades’ underworld and is home to Nancy, the protagonist of Every Heart a Doorway. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. The action of Beneath the Sugar Sky shifts through three different worldsthe real world where Eleanor has her school, the Halls of the Dead, and Confection. Talking foxes are a sign of fever, not guides sent to start some grand adventure.īut children, ah, children. Tornados kill people: they don’t carry them off to magical worlds. Childhood melts, and flights of fancy are replaced by rules. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious. Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible. “Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes.
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