Overview
One will escape. One will get caught. One will die.
Sixteen-year-old Charlotte checks into Turning Leaf, a Detroit shelter for runaway and at-risk teens, telling everyone she is fleeing a home unraveling around her father, who came back from war carrying wounds no one can see. The truth is sharper. 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.
As Charlotte retraces Ella's last days through a city of abandoned houses, empty lots, and thin places where the ordinary world feels close to something else, she uncovers a frightening world of manipulation, party culture, predatory older boys, and vulnerable teens slipping through the cracks. 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.
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 spirituality into a story about trauma, intuition, exploitation, and the invisible ways young people learn to survive when the adults meant to protect them fall short. It asks which missing girls get searched for, which get 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.
For readers of Laurie Halse Anderson, Tiffany D. Jackson, Ibi Zoboi, Courtney Summers, John Green, and E. Lockhart.
Praise "Kristin Bartley Lenz's masterful crafting is on full display throughout this unforgettable and relevant mystery." Leslie Connor, National Book Award finalist
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