Scan barcode
A review by megansmith
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.25
I wanted to like this more, but man I’m really disappointed in some aspects of this!
The most glaring and obvious one was this book’s frankly weird and gross relationships with race and gender. It threw me off immediately when the author was describing background characters and would almost exclusively call out characters by their race (“a Black woman, an Asian man, etc”) and use that as the only descriptor, but then every other person that was white was not described that way. Fast forward to one of the story’s villians having a moment with the main character and using really hateful language, it just cemented this really weird dynamic the author was pushing. You can make villains scary without having them make a bunch of hateful comments about getting “slapped like his wife”, calling a different character a J*p, telling the main character to go back to the kitchen etc etc in a really short span of pages. Hell, the scariest villain of the book barely said anything and she was far scarier than this racist, mysoginistic buffoon. Woof. That gets a lot of stars off for me, I expect more elevated writing with all the resources available for education out there these days.
Beyond that, this book I think also suffers from an identity crisis. Gruesome, gory deaths that were repeated and recounted across multiple pages, were paired with very surface level, almost young-adult style writing. Some characters felt so flat. and very emotional sections were honestly just boring for the agony or depth of suffering we could’ve seen the characters go through, to fully understand the scope of what was happening. I think the author just needed to pick a route, young adult or adult and commit - this honestly works much better as a young adult book imo.
What I do think this book did well were aspects of time travel, and bringing back loose ends later in the story. I also was intrigued by the premise of these magical books, and the solutions presented didnt disappoint.
HOWEVER, the real ending was truly disappointing for how thought out the rest of the book was. The book casually insinuates Cassie was the one who made all the books but then doesnt dive into it other than one brief page? And then how the hell does the negative energy just linger and take form from Barbary to Rachel? I think this book was going for some sequel bait but frankly, if this was setting fishing bait, they put the worm on and it fell off the hook before it even hit the water. I expected better follow through and clarity when the rest of the book easily provided it.
Overall; Im disappointed and was hoping for more from this. I say, feel free to skip. There are plenty of other books in this genre that avoid many of this book’s problems.
The most glaring and obvious one was this book’s frankly weird and gross relationships with race and gender. It threw me off immediately when the author was describing background characters and would almost exclusively call out characters by their race (“a Black woman, an Asian man, etc”) and use that as the only descriptor, but then every other person that was white was not described that way. Fast forward to one of the story’s villians having a moment with the main character and using really hateful language, it just cemented this really weird dynamic the author was pushing. You can make villains scary without having them make a bunch of hateful comments about getting “slapped like his wife”, calling a different character a J*p, telling the main character to go back to the kitchen etc etc in a really short span of pages. Hell, the scariest villain of the book barely said anything and she was far scarier than this racist, mysoginistic buffoon. Woof. That gets a lot of stars off for me, I expect more elevated writing with all the resources available for education out there these days.
Beyond that, this book I think also suffers from an identity crisis. Gruesome, gory deaths that were repeated and recounted across multiple pages, were paired with very surface level, almost young-adult style writing. Some characters felt so flat. and very emotional sections were honestly just boring for the agony or depth of suffering we could’ve seen the characters go through, to fully understand the scope of what was happening. I think the author just needed to pick a route, young adult or adult and commit - this honestly works much better as a young adult book imo.
What I do think this book did well were aspects of time travel, and bringing back loose ends later in the story. I also was intrigued by the premise of these magical books, and the solutions presented didnt disappoint.
HOWEVER, the real ending was truly disappointing for how thought out the rest of the book was.
Overall; Im disappointed and was hoping for more from this. I say, feel free to skip. There are plenty of other books in this genre that avoid many of this book’s problems.