Book of Doors

Opening this book in a cosy, shabby-chic bookshop is a sneaky lawyer's trick designed to make me care and I'm annoyed it worked.

I can't stay mad for long though because I am in love with this world! A world where there are magic books — not spell books but the books themselves are the spells. Use the Book of Pain to impart excruciating agony, the Book of Illusion can conjure a facsimile of your every heart's desire, and the Book of Doors will take you anywhere in the world.

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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.