If you could open a door to anywhere, where would you go?
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It's a book - an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door .
What Cassie is about to discover is that the Book of Doors is a special book that bestows an extraordinary powers on whoever possesses it, and soon she and her best friend Izzy are exploring all that the Book of Doors can do, swept away from their quiet lives by the possibilities of travelling to anywhere they want.
But the Book of Doors is not the only magical book in the world. There …
If you could open a door to anywhere, where would you go?
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It's a book - an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door .
What Cassie is about to discover is that the Book of Doors is a special book that bestows an extraordinary powers on whoever possesses it, and soon she and her best friend Izzy are exploring all that the Book of Doors can do, swept away from their quiet lives by the possibilities of travelling to anywhere they want.
But the Book of Doors is not the only magical book in the world. There are other books that can do wondrous and dreadful things when wielded by dangerous and ruthless individuals - individuals who crave what Cassie now possesses.
Suddenly Cassie and Izzy are confronted by violence and danger, and the only person who can help them is, it seems, Drummond Fox. He is a man fleeing his own demons - a man with his own secret library of magical books that he has hidden away in the shadows for safekeeping. Because there is a nameless evil out there that is hunting them all . . .
That there are books of and for just about everything is a neat conceit. On the one hand, of course. On the other, The Book of Pain, Luck, Illusions, etc. grant you control over these things. This relatively simple premise becomes quite complicated, overly so: time-travel, Books for anything the plot requires (Speed, Memories, Joy), ignored the constraints that every magical system needs. Entertaining though.
An exciting story set in a world of magical books.
5 stars
A wonderful debut novel involving magical books that turn into a time travel story as the implications of using one particular book are spelled out, but involves a truly evil personality that destroys people in gruesome ways that even I found uncomfortable.
At the start of the story, Cassie, who works in a bookshop, finds one of her customers has died and left her a special book: the Book of Doors. While showing it to her roommate, Izzy, she discovers its power: imagine a place, and it will be behind the door she opens. They use it to have adventures in far off places, but Izzy is uncomfortable and thinks they should stop using it.
They then encounter the librarian, Fox, who urges them to run when they meet an enemy who is after Fox: Fox keeps other magical books in a library and wants to protect the books from …
A wonderful debut novel involving magical books that turn into a time travel story as the implications of using one particular book are spelled out, but involves a truly evil personality that destroys people in gruesome ways that even I found uncomfortable.
At the start of the story, Cassie, who works in a bookshop, finds one of her customers has died and left her a special book: the Book of Doors. While showing it to her roommate, Izzy, she discovers its power: imagine a place, and it will be behind the door she opens. They use it to have adventures in far off places, but Izzy is uncomfortable and thinks they should stop using it.
They then encounter the librarian, Fox, who urges them to run when they meet an enemy who is after Fox: Fox keeps other magical books in a library and wants to protect the books from people who will use the books for evil purposes. As the story progresses, other people appear who are also after the book, including the above-mentioned evil personality who has killed Fox's friends in the past to get their books and will stop at nothing to get the other books from Fox, and Cassie's Book of Doors.
The story is full of exciting adventures and characters. But one of the more interesting aspects of the story is the time travel. As the story progresses, events that happen early in the story reappear again later, but now seen from the point of view of characters who have travelled into the past. It all hangs together (without involving time travel paradoxes) and adds depth to the story by making the reader re-evaluate events as new viewpoints on past events are provided.
The story also has its emotional highs, and includes (to me) a rather shocking scene that proves to be a pivotal one in this world of magical books. As in many tales involving time travel, the ending of the story also provides the beginning.
After such an impressive debut novel, one hopes for more exciting stories by the author.
