Reviews

This book really frustrated me. The premise of the book is inherently quite interesting, full of wonder and intrigue — a young woman discovers the Book of Doors, a special book which can take you anywhere, and is pursued for the book. Unfortunately, while the premise is interesting, the execution falls very, very flat, due to a number of factors.

The first is the prose. While normally I don’t complain about prose, the prose in this novel is awful. This book would be 50% better if every sentence was cut by about 20%. There’s so much repetition in the prose, or cases where the author states something that the character is thinking which could have been inferred by previous statements made by the character, and it feels like a broader case of tell, don’t show. Don’t let the reader infer anything, everything has to be spelled out or the reader won’t get it. The novel feels like an editor should have taken another pass over the novel, to remove some of the

The second is the characters. Broadly speaking, the characters in this story are all incredibly unintelligent, and don’t resolve problems in a way reasonable for most people. The characters as a result feel in many cases like parodies, or crude sketches of characters which have yet to be fleshed out. The villain is just sadistically evil for no real reason, the morally grey characters don’t take the means that are the most conducive to achieving the ends they would like to achieve, and our heroines are too stunned by every bad thing that happens to them that they are pathetically slow to respond to events. The best example of this is in the auction, where this woman running the auction of magic books to welders of these books takes the worst precaution ever to prevent people from using those books to steal the book she’s auctioning - she asks nicely for them to give up their books for the duration of the auction. The whole events surrounding this sequence are irritating, since it seems like any half-wit can take all of these books — indeed, one half-wit is successful in doing so, and is only stopped by even more incompetence on his part. Another case of incompetence comes from our heroes, when they dispatch an enemy by sending him into the past, but not the far past, the near-enough past for him to live through the entire time back up to the present, and get revenge. Overall, the characters are frustratingly incompetent, and the only reason our protagonists prevail is that our antagonists are too stupid and sadistic to actually finish the job. The final confrontation was a little better, with our protagonists being intelligent, for once, but they still almost lose to overconfidence, and after a book of watching them being incompetent, this wasn’t enough to salvage this critique.

The final bit, which is the most frustrating, is the perspective of the characters. This book feels like it was written by a white author, which is seen in how some of the comments left unexamined by the narrative. Many times characters are just described by the color of their skin or their presumed nationality -- the Black man, the Egyptian woman, etc. Now, this on its own would be fine, except for the fact that this only happens to the non-white characters -- all of our protagonists are white, and even the non-protagonist white characters are described by name, while with the non-white characters there’s a 50-50 chance. Also, there’s a bit of odd presumption, where the special books are assumed by our protagonists to explain certain events in history that “don’t make sense”, like why the Egyptians were so technologically advanced for their time, or why the Chinese developed a lasting civilization, without any reference to any European civilizations. There’s similar issues with regard to queer characters, but we see even fewer queer characters than non-white characters, so it’s harder to give specific examples. I doubt the author harbors any racist or queer phobic tendencies, but this book feels like it was written from a very narrow perspective, and it makes the world feel small and alienating.

I really came into this book wanting to like it -- the premise of the plot is something that’s inherently very appealing. But the novel falls so flat of the promise it holds, and it’s aggravating, since it means a better book won’t be made with this premise for a while. Overall, 1.5/5 stars, rounded down to 1/5 stars -- a lot of potential, but ultimately a disappointment.