In the summer of 1901, at the age of seven, January Scaller found a Door. You know the kind of door–they lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, to Atlantis, to all the places never found on a map.

Years later, January has forgotten her brief glimpse of Elsewhere. Her life is quiet and lonely but safe on her guardian’s estate, until one day she stumbles across a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds in its pages, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure, and danger. A book that might lead her back to the half-remembered door of her childhood.

But, as January gets answers to questions she never imagined, shadows creep closer. There are truths about the world that should never be revealed.

Unfortunately, I did not like this book. I know this is a loved book that got some hype around it, but I couldn’t see what others saw in it. It took me two tries to actually get through the whole thing. The first time, I tried reading the physical paperback but only made it through the first three chapters. Then I set it aside for a few months and then tried again via audiobook. For me, changing the format seemed to help, but I still didn’t like it, so I increased the speed just to finish it. 

It’s extremely slow-paced; therefore, I became very, very bored with it. It barely kept my attention. There is not much plot or action, and it felt sooo long and drawn out for not much payoff by the end. It all just fell flat for me and couldn’t keep me interested. I only finished it because it was a buddy read. 

At times, the story was confusing and hard to visualize. I did not like the story within a story concept at all. Those chapters, when January would read from her book, felt jarring and took me out of the overall story. I preferred to learn more about January than the characters in her book. Of course, everything eventually connects, but I really didn’t like those portions of the book. 

I couldn’t relate to or connect to any of the characters, so ultimately, I didn’t care about what happened to them. Relationships felt weak; there wasn’t much dialogue, too much description, and again, nothing really happened. But I did like the narrator’s voices for each of the characters. She did a great job. 

This book had beautiful, lush, lyrical prose, which I usually love. However, it was way, way overdone in this instance. It was highly distracting and felt pretentious and heavy-handed. It was a bunch of fluff that took away from the actual story. This book could’ve been a lot shorter without all the fancy descriptions and exposition. 

Overall, I feel like this could’ve been an entertaining fantasy story, but it completely missed the mark. There were so many more interesting paths this story could’ve gone down, so it’s unfortunate that it didn’t go down any of them. It was not what I was expecting at all, and sounded better when I read the summary. The execution was done poorly. 

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend this book. I do not feel like this author is for me, so I will not be reading any more of her works.