This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Some excellent recent books have made wonderful use of the fairy tale/fantasy ingredient of opening doorways to other worlds. My favorites are Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. So I couldn’t resist picking up Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors.
Getting started, I may have expected something more like the other books, but this is its own creature. The titular Book of Doors turns out to be just one of many books that enable the owner or user/holder to perform some kind of magic.
Cassie, a young woman in her 20s working at a bookstore in New York City, is living a quiet life until a regular at the store gives her a small book. Inside, it says “any door is every door” and contains a lot of scribbled drawings. She and her best friend and roommate, Izzy, figure out that they can go anywhere through any door as long as Cassie just pictures a door she’s seen.
It is absolutely amazing and delightful and opens up the world. But it also very quickly opens up the girls to danger, because some ruthless and violent people are looking for the Book of Doors. They soon meet a man named Drummond Fox, who has a whole library of these magical books hidden away to keep them from being misused. Fox has been on the run, hiding in the shadows, for 10 years, since a horrible, nameless woman killed his friends and took several books.
But now it may be time for him to work with Cassie to defeat this woman once and for all and to stop hiding. It’s going to take all the ingenuity they have and cooperation from others who know about these books to make it happen.
I was not disappointed with The Book of Doors: it was clever and spellbinding and I just couldn’t put it down. I love what the author did with it and how the threads of the plot came together.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 30 uses of strong language, 20 instances of moderate profanity, a few uses of mild language, a couple uses of British (bl-) profanity, and 25 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Violence occurs regularly. There is a villain who injures and kills people with guns and magic, and another who tortures and kills mostly with magic and enjoys seeing the victims suffer. There are some unusual ways of people being killed, and a good amount of it is detailed and icky.
Click here to purchase your copy of The Book of Doors on Amazon.
