“Wherever there were people, there were secrets.”

Sisters of the Vast Black mainly takes place aboard a living spaceship crewed by nuns who are more interested in providing medical assistance than converting heathens. However, they’ve recently been assigned a new priest who may want to change their mission.

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Every Heart a Doorway takes place in a boarding school for children who have traveled through portals to other worlds and desperately want to go back because they don’t quite fit in to this world anymore. Their parents, while well-meaning, just don’t understand them. They think their children are fantasy-prone and didn’t really go to another world. However, Eleanor, the headmistress of the school, knows other worlds do exist because she has visited one herself.

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“To be in this world, you must always be a little less than yourself. With every day that passes, you must give up a little more.”

After the events described in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a fifteen-year-old Miranda arrives in Milan, but people treat her like a monster. They force her to stay in her room and make her wear a veil whenever she leaves. She wonders if she looks like a monster, although she doesn’t think she does.

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Ugh. This book. Where to begin? First off, its run-on sentences, paragraphs that are pages long, and chapters in which nothing much happens make it a chore to read. There are over a hundred pages of endnotes, so you have to keep flipping to the end of the book while you’re reading. Annoyingly, many of the endnotes didn’t need to be endnotes. The shorter ones could have been parenthetical statements, and the long ones should have just been chapters in their own right. If this wasn’t bad enough, several of the endnotes have footnotes of their own.

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We start with a spaceship escaping from an evil AI. Our point of view characters on the ship are both children who don’t really know what happened, so the mystery of what the AI is and why it’s killing people can last longer. They end up landing on a planet with medieval-level technology. We then shift to the point of view of the aliens, who are truly alien.

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