The Door Swings Open
When doors swing open, the truth is more dangerous than imagined. One will escape. One will get caught. One will die. Sixteen-year-old Charlotte is drawn to a teen runaway shelter--fleeing a home unraveling around her war-haunted, veteran father. The full truth: her former best friend, Ella, disappeared after a brief stay at the same shelter, and Charlotte is convinced the adults have missed something dark beneath the surface. Inside the shelter, tension builds around Jolie, a terrified girl hiding from dangerous people, and Aiden, a magnetic runaway who senses more than he can explain and may know exactly what happened to Ella. As Charlotte retraces Ella's last days through a city of abandoned houses, empty lots, and thin places where the ordinary world seems to hold more than it reveals, she uncovers a frightening world of manipulation, sexual trafficking, and vulnerable teens slipping through the cracks. Told through an unforgettable chorus of narrators, human and inanimate, from the teens themselves to the rooms, streets, and objects that watch over them, The Door Swings Open blends literary suspense, emotional realism, mystery, and a thread of magical realism into a story about trauma, intuition, exploitation, grief, and the invisible ways young people learn to survive when the adults meant to protect them fall short. It asks which missing girls are searched for, which are forgotten, and what it costs to tell a story you have been warned to keep quiet. Written by licensed clinical social worker Kristin Bartley Lenz, the novel handles sexual exploitation and trafficking with sensitivity rather than sensation, and leaves room for hope, for connection, and for the fierce, ordinary courage of teenagers who refuse to look away. At its heart, this is a story about resilience and the deep bonds of friendship and family. For readers who want a powerful, emotionally accessible look at the spectrum of sexual exploitation facing vulnerable teens today, wrapped inside a gripping, literary suspense story. For readers of Laurie Halse Anderson, Tiffany D. Jackson, Ibi Zoboi, Natasha Friend, Gayle Forman, Courtney Summers, and E. Lockhart, John Green and Jandy Nelson.
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