5/5 stars
The Book of Doors, by Gareth Brown (2024)
Fantastic book for book-lovers!
Cassie works at a bookstore in New York City. She has her regular customers, and outside of work lives with her best friend Izzy. One evening while closing up the shop she starts to chat with one of the regulars, who gives her a book. It's not a book she can read, being mostly strange drawings of doors, and mysterious illegible writing, apart from the message to her, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that, with it, "any door is every door."
Back at home that night, she discovers the meaning of the phrase. The Book of Doors allows the owner to use any door to get into any other door. She and Izzy begin to experiment with the book to travel around the world, revisiting some of Cassie's favorite places. But all is not as rosy as it seems. Soon they are confronted by a man named Drummond Fox, who tells them they are in grave danger. The Book of Doors is one of multiple, highly sought after magical books. To prove this, he uses two such books on Cassie - the Book of Shadows allows the user to completely disappear into the shadows, and the Book of Memory allows Drummond to show Cassie the true danger she is in by reliving a gruesome incident from his past.
What follows is a truly fascinating, intelligent, and magical book of time travel, superpowers, and clashes of good and evil as Cassie, Drummond, Izzy, try to keep the Book of Doors safe, and defeat those who would use the books maliciously. The system of magic is so imaginative and brilliantly constructed, and the characters are well-developed, lovable, and flawed.
AND! Time travel stuff usually has so many major holes in the logic that it's hard to get into. But honestly, this is maybe the best depiction of it that I've seen. It's hard to believe this is Brown's first novel, as it is plotted out so skillfully. There are plenty of surprises and twists, and somehow all the threads weave together in the end. I'm sure there are some holes in the book's time travel philosophy logic, but really it was very neatly done, and kind of stunning.
In short, I loved it, and while I don't buy books very often anymore, preferring to get them from the library, but I did decide to purchase this book after reading it, because I'm going to need to revisit it some time!
A few of the other books that make an appearance are:
The Book of Luck
The Book of Mist
The Book of Pain
The Book of Despair
The Book of Joy
The Book of Illusions
The Book of Healing
and more that are briefly mentioned, plus more that may have not yet been discovered... I could see the possibility for a sequel, for sure. And I'd read it!
UP NEXT: Graveyard Shift, by M.L. Rio
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