A huge thanks to NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
“This is the Book of Doors. Hold it in your hand, and any door is every door.”
⭐⭐⭐
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown is a contemporary thriller featuring low fantasy, time travel, and a classic good versus evil storyline that hooked me in from the beginning. It’s an ambitious debut novel that features some interesting concepts. For example, books are a vital aspect of the story and magic system, which I loved (give me more books inside of books). However, there are some minor details that bogged the story down for me.
If you could open a door to anywhere, where would you go?
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It’s a book – an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door .
What Cassie is about to discover is that the Book of Doors is a special book that bestows an extraordinary powers on whoever possesses it, and soon she and her best friend Izzy are exploring all that the Book of Doors can do, swept away from their quiet lives by the possibilities of travelling to anywhere they want.
But the Book of Doors is not the only magical book in the world. There are other books that can do wondrous and dreadful things when wielded by dangerous and ruthless individuals – individuals who crave what Cassie now possesses.
Suddenly Cassie and Izzy are confronted by violence and danger, and the only person who can help them is, it seems, Drummond Fox. He is a man fleeing his own demons – a man with his own secret library of magical books that he has hidden away in the shadows for safekeeping. Because there is a nameless evil out there that is hunting them all . . .
Because some doors should never be opened.
The pacing is influenced by the character’s decisions, and to be frank… some of these decisions are just annoying. Thrillers often struggle from this, and these characters are definitely flawed, so in these instances, I often shrugged the pain points away. Fortunately, these pacing issues didn’t slow down my reading.
In addition, some of the language and character “flaws” feel a bit awkward. One of the villains often has derogatory opinions against people of color and women, and while they are certainly cringeworthy, I had to remind myself that he is a villain. With the good versus evil dynamics so clearly characterized, this language becomes a bit easier to swallow when you realize this character is supposed to be a horrible person. However, I would have appreciated some more depth instead of it being “bad man is racist and sexist because he is bad man.”
Some of the character descriptions felt unnecessary, and it made them feel one-dimensional at times. Cassie, while understandably enchanted by the power granted to her by the Book of Doors, feels weighed down by her own selfishness, to the point where I wanted to shake her. One of Izzy’s main “flaws” is her obsession with her own body. Body shaming is not a good character flaw, and these physical descriptions felt a lot like a dude wrote a book about a woman and, of course, had to focus on her weight or breast size.
I wanted so badly for The Book of Doors to become a favorite, and while it is ultimately a fun read (I finished it in two days), there are some aspects that left a slightly sour taste in my mouth.