Reading With Tyler

Name: The Book of Doors
Series: Stand Alone
Author: Gareth Brown
Publisher: Transworld Digital
Format: Kindle
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Mystery, Contemporary
Noted Tropes: Books about Books (is this a trope?)
Steam or Spice: None

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Review:

The Book of Doors was chosen as our Book Club book for February, and it’s also part of my 2025 challenges as it was my friend, Kay’s book of the year in 2024 (though this changed and flipped I think as she was torn between her top 2 or 3 if I remember correctly). It was, however, not my pick for the book club and it wasn’t on my radar before… So I went into it blind.

By now, I’ve come to terms with my rating for The Book of Doors even though it goes against a lot of what I’m seeing on Goodreads – not to mention again, it was the book of 2024 for my friend! I really struggled with this rating initially because of this fact. I felt like I’d missed something or perhaps was being too (uncessarily) harsh on the book… but in the end it just didn’t work for me.

However, let’s begin talking about what did work for me! I loved the concept of the magical Books (I may not have loved how they came to exist but the concept itself was brilliant). In addition to loving the concept I really enjoyed Drummund’s gatherings with his friends to discuss the books, while there was a deadly hunt for the books going on outside his gathering.

Speaking of Drummund – I loved him and Cassie. Though at first I thought their whole thing was odd, and whilst romance is absolutely not the main plot of this book, I could see the little bits of it being hinted at between this pair… Which as I said was odd at least until it wasn’t – this itself is hard to discuss without spoilers…

There were a lot of characters and a lot of POVs in this book and it’s hard to keep track of them all sometimes… there also seems to be quite the divide on the characters I remember vs the ones I kind of remember… This did contribute to me disliking the book a little (when everyone seems important how do you track it!?). Cassie’s friend Izzy, was a bit odd to me at first but I grew to love her and missed her in the chapters where Cassie was present but Izzy wasn’t! Mr Webber was one of those characters who didn’t seem too important until he was, but I loved him and his relationship with Cassie was brilliant and rooted in realism (thinking someone is nuts but caring about them anyway)… We’d be here all day if I listed all of the characters so lets move on…

So if it wasn’t the romance that I wasn’t completely on board with, and if the blame can’t completely be put on the amount of characters that it became overwhelming… what didn’t I like about The Book of Doors? It was the time travel. Simply put, I felt like The Book of Doors used time travel to wrap up into an uncanny perfectly neat bow… and I didn’t like that. I think, looking back on it, it did try not to come across that way as Cassie doesn’t save everyone with time travel so I suppose it wasn’t a completely uncanny perfect neat wrap up… but it was close enough that it just didn’t feel satisfying to me.

The ending tied up all loose ends, so I don’t mean the author did a bad job telling their story. The oppsite, they thought of everything and told a brilliant story… It just didn’t sit right with me and left me wishing something else had happened. I can’t explain it fully, but overall I enjoyed the story. I found it complicated more often than not, and I wasn’t on board with all elements of it. But in the end, it just felt like the time travel aspect of it was too neat, too perfect (not enough wibbly, wobbly, timey, wimey… stuff.)

If you loved The Book of Doors then I am glad you did, and I didn’t hate it! I just didn’t gell with it in the same way others have. So again, I extend my apologies to Kay as she really enjoyed The Book of Doors, along with everyone else who loved it! But this is an example of not every ‘hit’ is a hit for everyone.

“I’ve read it before, but as I get older, I find comfort in rereading favorites. It’s like spending time with old friends.”