When Nancy entered a mysterious door in the basement, she found herself in the Halls of the Dead, where stillness and silence are valued above all else. Now returned to the noise and bustle of our world, she has been sent to Eleanor West’s school for children who were “lost” in various fairy lands, skeleton kingdoms, and realms of magic. All of the students (and their teachers) long to return “home” to those magical worlds, while struggling to learn to live in the mundane. As if that weren’t enough of a challenge, though, there’s also a killer stalking the school.
This is a short but rich novella, with a fascinating underlying theory of portal worlds, described along axes of Nonsense and Logic, Virtue and Wickedness. All of the characters traveled to different worlds, and are shaped by the experience in unique ways; their stories are only briefly sketched, but tantalizingly. And though the book is able to stand alone as the story of Nancy’s role in bringing an end to the murders at the Home for Wayward Children, it also launches a collection of stories exploring the other worlds that are hinted at here.