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A review by gschwabauer
The Door Before by N.D. Wilson
3.0
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.
It didn't do anything wrong., mind you. But Hyacinth never felt fleshed-out to me the way that Henry did in the 100 Cupboards series. I wondered, as I was reading, if N.D. Wilson was so excited about the backstories of Mordecai and Caleb that he accidentally made them the stars of the show instead of Hyacinth, the actual main character.
It just didn't have that same raw creepiness that the originals had. Wilson doesn't quite delve into the precise details of setting that would have made me squirm. There's reference to quite a few creepy concepts, but I felt like I actually "saw" few of them. No matter what world we're in, the original series has an unsettling aesthetic, a low thrumming overtone of "danger! danger!" And while my mind felt that way about this book, my gut didn't. In Henry's story, the tension ramps up slowly, but in this book things feel very . . . abrupt. And no one seems to react the way a real person would react.
I did enjoy the time I spent reading; Wilson's prose is excellent and his ideas are interesting. His worldbuilding concepts are fascinating and inventive. This book just felt like it was simplified and stripped down for a younger audience, the characters far flatter and the worlds more bare-bones. I wanted it to be about twice as long if it was going to recapture the magic of the original. I think it could have been twice as long and been nearly twice as good. Oh well.
It didn't do anything wrong., mind you. But Hyacinth never felt fleshed-out to me the way that Henry did in the 100 Cupboards series. I wondered, as I was reading, if N.D. Wilson was so excited about the backstories of Mordecai and Caleb that he accidentally made them the stars of the show instead of Hyacinth, the actual main character.
It just didn't have that same raw creepiness that the originals had. Wilson doesn't quite delve into the precise details of setting that would have made me squirm. There's reference to quite a few creepy concepts, but I felt like I actually "saw" few of them. No matter what world we're in, the original series has an unsettling aesthetic, a low thrumming overtone of "danger! danger!" And while my mind felt that way about this book, my gut didn't. In Henry's story, the tension ramps up slowly, but in this book things feel very . . . abrupt. And no one seems to react the way a real person would react.
I did enjoy the time I spent reading; Wilson's prose is excellent and his ideas are interesting. His worldbuilding concepts are fascinating and inventive. This book just felt like it was simplified and stripped down for a younger audience, the characters far flatter and the worlds more bare-bones. I wanted it to be about twice as long if it was going to recapture the magic of the original. I think it could have been twice as long and been nearly twice as good. Oh well.