There are two schools for children who return from the doors. There's Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a welcoming place where they believe and welcome all that you are, where you can be safe and relatively content as you wait for your door to open.
Then there's the school for those who want to forget. Those who presumably want to forget things too horrible or too wonderful. After the adventure in The Moors, Cora finds herself among that number. The drowned gods don't want to let go of a new catspaw. Now all she needs to do is convince Miss West to let her own nightmare happen, losing one of her students to the Whitethorn Institute.
Cora's not swimming away from her problems, she's facing them head-on, but she's finding her new school has problems of its own. Should she place her own recovery over the fates of the rest of the students? Now it's time to gather allies and decide if her adventure ends here or not.
"Welcome to the Whitethorn Institute. The first step is always admitting you need help, and you’ve already taken that step by requesting a transfer into our company."
This book contains examples of the following tropes:
- Anti-Magic: The first example seen, it seems the way that the institute is set up is enough to keep any door from coming to the children and matrons there, once they get off the grounds however...
- Boarding School of Horrors: The Whitethorn Institute. Bullying is encouraged, everything is strictly controlled, students are constantly monitored and interrogated, and if any of them speak out there's an isolation room where they are starved, deprived of sleep, and even beaten if it's deemed "necessary".
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Cora, Regan, Sumi, and even Marian have moments where they know they'll be punished for it, but decide to stand up for others anyway because they're heroes and it's what they do.
- Doesn't Know Their Own Child: Justified when your kid comes back years older than they originally were.
- Forced Transformation: The nameless girl was cursed by the Rat King and is slowly turning into a rat, shrinking day by day and sprouting hairs. The transformation reverses when she escapes.
- Freudian Excuse: The headmaster went to his world and was sure he wanted to go home, and the denizens of that world stripped him of his individuality, so that his parents and sister didn't even recognize him and he was unable to make any connections because he was so easily forgotten. Because of this, he's grown to believe that all worlds are evil and that he needs to protect children from their doors.
- Gaslighting: The M.O. of the Whitethorn Institute is convincing all of their students that their trips to other worlds were imaginary and never happened. Cora is shunned because she has an obvious Mark of the Supernatural.
- Good Parents: Cora's parents supported her when she was bullied and did their best to protect her, and have accepted that she will one day return to the Trenches because she was happy there.
- The Ground Is Lava: One of the worlds a girl went to had this literally, the laws of physics were out to lunch. She's the only one who truly doesn't want to go back to her world.
- Kids Are Cruel: The children at Cora's school were cruel to her for being fat and none of them would befriend her. Even when they believe she's committed suicide and are pretending to be her friends for clout, they slip in nasty remarks and "jokes" about how fat she was.
- Lost World: The only thing Stephanie mentions about her world is that there were dinosaurs, and she considers that wondrous enough. And given how quickly her door arrived, they obviously love her too.
- Mark of the Supernatural: Cora has gained an iridescent layer to her skin as a mark of the Drowned Gods possessing her in Come Tumbling Down. When she fights them off and claims their power for her own, that iridescence is transferred to her hair.
- Mental Health Recovery Arc: The book is this for Cora, part of the reason she's in the Whitethorn Institute is to get the right support to fight off the Drowned Gods.
- Mistaken for Dyed: Cora's classmates accuse her of dying her hair blue for attention. The Whitethorn Institute encourages this sort of conformist bullying to help Gaslight the students into doubting their own lives.
- Mugging the Monster: The nameless girl tries to be an Alpha Bitch to Sumi. Sumi grabs her wrist so fast they don't even see her move, and gives her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that leaves her in tears.
- Naked People Are Funny: Cora and Regan need a distraction at one point. Cue Sumi tearing down the halls with all her clothes off.
- The Nameless:
- While also an example of Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep", the man who everyone calls "the headmaster" isn't, as when he went through the door his very name was stripped from him. The real headmaster Whitethorn is a wizard and he has designs on the doors.
- There's a girl whose real name was stolen by the Rat King, and so her real name can't be heard. Even nicknames will eventually fade into silence if anyone addresses her directly. It's revealed at the very end that her name is Marian.
- The matrons are graduates who grow too old without giving up, and have their names stripped from them. The false headmaster accidentally calling one by her name brings back her identity.
- Narnia Time: Rowena's world had a veil of clocks, and she spent six years there while only three hours passed in the real world. Because she didn't revert back, her parents didn't recognize her when she returned and she was thrown out of her home.
- Never Sleep Again: The Drowned Gods can access Cora's mind through her dreams, and so she gets barely enough sleep to stay alive. After weeks of sleep deprivation, she's so desperate that she convinces Miss West to let her go to Whitethorn in the hopes that'll finally break their grip on her. After she wards them off, she sleeps well for the first time in a long time.
- Peer-Pressured Bully: The default at Whitethorn Institute, where matrons discourage camaraderie and encourage bullying to keep the students repressed and telling on each other.
- Planet of Steves: According to Regan, all deer are named The Lord/Lady of The Forest. Even if there's another deer three steps away.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Invoked and discussed. Cora eventually realizes that Whitethorn Institute considers themselves heroes who are saving children from their Doors, which enables them to do terrible things in the name of that heroism. When one of the students accuses her of being a killer, she realizes that it's true, because she killed sailors trying to kill her mermaid friends, and wonders if those sailors were heroes too.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Cora went to Whitethorn under the assumption that learning how to forget would help her fend off the Drowned Gods. Instead, fighting Whitethorn's oppressive system is what made her strong enough to reject them.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: What Regan retains from the Hooflands, she can broadly understand any hoofed animal. They all have their own personality traits and cultural quirks.
- Villain Has a Point: Cora eventually realizes that for children like Rowena and the headmaster whose worlds only brought trauma and grief, the Whitethorn Institute serves a very necessary purpose in helping them heal and forget. The problem lies in the fact that Whitethorn has quit caring about whether its students want to forget their worlds and just wants to enforce their way on everyone, and its highly abusive methods make it horrible even for willing students.
- Weight Woe: Deconstructed. Cora has been surrounded by fatphobic harassment her entire life for being a naturally big girl, no matter how hard her parents and doctors reassured her that it was just the way her body was. Her door to the Trenches came when she tried to drown herself as a teenager. While it wasn't a problem at Eleanor West's school, the girls at Whitethorn Institute are trying to be normal and are much nastier about it.
- You Shall Not Pass!: Rowena stays behind to delay the staff when the girls flee Whitethorn, partially to give the other girls time to escape, and partially because she's actually fine with forgetting her world.
