A small thing that I always look forward to in the new year is when Goodreads makes the little “Year in Books” thing. There’s something satisfying about seeing all the books I read organized in a little graphic. It reminds me of the books I completely forgot I read this year and that 2024 went on a lot longer than I thought it did. But one book stood out like a sore thumb: Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors. And accompanying it was one star—the only one star I have ever given a book on Goodreads.
I was deceived by a pretty cover and an interesting blurb. Shades of sky, cobalt, and indigo transition into each other, radiating out from a door with a girl falling through the gradient of blue as stars twinkle around the edges. The inside flap of the dust jacket summarizes almost the entire story: Cassie works at a bookstore, and one day, her favorite customer dies. But he leaves her the Book of Doors, a magical book that can turn any door into a portal to wherever the user wants to travel. Cassie and her roommate, Izzy, get swept up into the world of book collectors and ally themselves with Drummond Fox, a magical book librarian, as dark forces hunt them.
Perhaps the most egregious thing the blurb does is proclaim that The Book of Doors is perfect for readers who liked The Night Circus. Erin Morgenstern is one of my favorite authors, so to compare Gareth Brown to her is setting a high bar. Maybe I should have known that no one could possibly live up to her standard. But this is a book about books and an urban fantasy, two things I love. Coupled with its beautiful cover, how bad could it possibly be? Surely there would be something I’d like in here.
Well, the premise of The Book of Doors is good, that I can still say, but I wish that literally any other author had written this book. I knew about five pages in that I wasn’t going to like it, but I slogged all the way through because I am, for better or for worse, a completionist. My thinking was that if I finished the book, I’d be done with it forever. Obviously, that’s not true since I’ve continued to think about it to the point of writing this review. On the bright side, finishing the book allowed me to definitively say that it is, without a doubt, one of the worst books that I’ve ever read and, by far, the worst book I read in 2024.
I should say that my negative opinions about this book are in the minority. At the time of writing, The Book of Doors has a 4.05/5-star rating on Goodreads, with 36% of reviews being 5 stars and 39% being 4 stars. Only 1% of reviews have a 1-star rating, which would make this the only time I’ve been in the 1% of anything. Part of the reason why I’m even writing this blog post in the first place is to offset those stats and make up for the lack of negative reviews. I don’t think this book has received the criticism it deserves, and if you want something done right, I guess you have to do it yourself. I was genuinely fuming while reading this book. No book has made me feel furious the way this one has. And misery loves company, so here we are.
But all that aside, art is subjective. Liking or disliking a book is a matter of personal preference. My opinion is in no way the definitive truth, no matter how much I wish it was. If you enjoyed The Book of Doors (and are still reading this post for some reason), good for you! God knows I wish I had.
In case you couldn’t tell by this extremely long introduction, I have a lot to say about this book. As much as I would love to go through it page by page and point out every little thing that made me mad, I don’t think anyone else wants that. So, because I love the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson, I have organized my thoughts into a numbered list-- and I’m going to hope that invoking Jenny’s name won’t backfire on me the way Brown invoking Morgenstern’s did.
Number One: Cassie is annoying and I hate her
Cassie is our 20-something FMC who works at a bookstore, which somehow pays enough to cover her half of a two-bedroom apartment in NYC. She likes reading books and traveling, and that’s supposed to make her relatable to the audience. Unfortunately, everything else about her is so annoying that I’ve decided to gatekeep reading and traveling. If I had to sum up her personality, I’d go with innocent, starry-eyed dreamer that I could see unironically saying “gee-willikers.” Canonically, she’s supposed to have backpacked through Europe and traveled internationally on her own, yet she has zero self-preservation skills and will trust just about anyone. She has no faults (well, she is an idiot, but the book doesn’t want us to believe that) or trauma, even though she was raised by her grandfather after her parents abandoned her. Though Cassie is still grieving the loss of her grandfather, her familial relationships are never explored to a satisfying degree. Brown set up something that could make Cassie interesting but then did nothing with it. Instead, he chose to make her so bland and “whimsical” that she comes across more as a cartoon character than a believable person. Being as innocent as Cassie is just unrealistic for women in our current social landscape. In fact, she is so whimsical that she is so enthralled watching snow fall that she doesn’t even realize that her favorite customer, John, is dying to advance the plot. Cassie finds the Book of Doors next to his body and is so taken with it and the indecipherable language inside that she’s not even sad about John.
When Cassie gets home, she figures out how to use the Book of Doors to open portals to wherever she wants to go. She and her roommate, Izzy, then spend the whole night teleporting themselves around NYC. Izzy is supposed to be the pessimist in the relationship, but really that just means that she rightly has reservations about trusting a magic book of unknown origins. She tells Cassie that they probably shouldn’t mess around with it and that the Book of Doors could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. Cassie decides that she doesn’t want to worry about that and keeps playing with it once Izzy goes to bed. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to think that Cassie is smart or right in any way because the narrative proves her wrong when dangerous people show up and try to take the Book of Doors. Izzy is correct to be hesitant about playing with forces that they don’t understand, but Cassie never thinks anything through or cares about the consequences of her own actions. Why am I supposed to be rooting for this character? She’s not smart, and she’s not interesting. Instead, she comes across as Brown’s idea of what a strong protagonist should be, but clearly, he didn’t put much work into her character.
Number Two: Gareth Brown is a male author who doesn’t know how to write women
This is probably the reason why I hate Cassie so much: how she’s written. The Book of Doors is Brown’s first novel, so maybe I should go easy on him, but I won’t. After John dies and Cassie arrives at her apartment, she happens to catch her reflection in a mirror. This is how we get a description of her. Not only is this an overused trope that I thought we were done with, but the description is so bad. We’re told that she’s disappointed by her appearance; she thinks she’s too thin and too tall, her hips are too narrow, and her chest is too flat. Also, she never wears makeup, and her hair is untamable. So Cassie’s not like the other girls. I can’t help but feel like her hair and lack of makeup were mentioned in an attempt to make her relatable and avoid having to put effort into her characterization. But in 2024, it just feels cringey and made me roll my eyes. If The Book of Doors came out ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have had a problem with her description because a female character not liking her appearance was pretty par for the course. Times have changed, and I’m an adult now, so I can see the problems with it. There has been a lot of deserved criticism against this trope, as it tends to sexualize the female character in question, especially coming from a male author. With Cassie’s description, there is unnecessary focus on her hips and chest, neither of which are integral to the plot. It’s also kind of demeaning to actual women that match Cassie’s description. If Cassie, the protagonist, doesn’t like her body, then why should you? This is not a story about Cassie learning to love herself. At the end of the novel, because her character is developed so little, we don’t know if Cassie feels more comfortable in her own skin. Why bring any of this stuff up in the first place if you’re not going to do anything worthwhile with it?
But wait, there’s more! It’s not just Cassie who hates her body; seemingly every other woman also does. After playing with the Book of Doors, Cassie and Izzy go to a diner, where Izzy calls herself “disgusting” because she’s eating pancakes and bacon. Cassie tries to tell her that her body’s perfect just the way it is, but Izzy remarks that if she keeps eating like this, she’ll end up like her aunts. This is not the witty dialogue that Brown thinks it is. Not only is Izzy putting herself down, but she’s also putting other women down, and Cassie isn’t pushing back. Because Cassie’s the main character and the book wants us to believe that she’s morally correct about everything, it kind of gives the impression that what Izzy is saying is okay. And a woman calling herself “disgusting” for eating bacon and pancakes isn’t okay. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone with a fully developed brain enjoying this book, so these body image issues aren’t something that should be showcased like this. If Cassie and Izzy can talk about themselves like this, why shouldn’t the young, impressionable reader? Again, there is next to no character development in this novel, so these body image issues are brought up and never changed. The fact that almost every woman says something like this about herself makes me wonder what Brown’s deal is. Frankly, it’s insulting.
There are also multiple moments throughout the book where it’s stated that Cassie and Izzy sometimes share a bed to keep warm. I have some close female friends that I’ve slept in the same bed with before, but it’s never been for the express goal of cuddling to stay warm. I’m not sure if Brown thinks this is something that women actually do or if it’s some kind of fantasy. Like, this one is honestly so weird, and I’ve never come across anything like it before. I genuinely don’t know what to say other than it’s not realistic, and it feels like fetishization. According to Google, Brown is 45 years old, which I think makes all of this so much worse. I don’t like that a middle-aged man is talking about women’s bodies via his own female characters like this. All this stuff just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Number Three: The characters talk out loud to themselves
This happens incessantly, and it drove me insane, so I wanted to bring it up early on so you could picture it happening. It’s mostly them saying aloud what they’re thinking or feeling. The Book of Doors is told in third person, with limited perspective, so the narrator already has access to the characters’ interiority. Meaning that there’s no reason they need to say this stuff out loud. Having them speak to themselves makes them look cartoonish, and therefore, they’re not believable as real people.
I didn’t know where else to mention this, but it’s kind of similar. On page 77 (yes, I went back and found it), Cassie smiles to herself three separate times while remembering something. On one page, she remembers three different things that all cause her to smile. I thought this was redundant. Either two of these instances could have been cut, or they could have been combined so that she only remembers one thing and smiles to herself once. The Book of Doors had a whole team behind it, and they all somehow let this slip past. Once again, I can’t help but feel like my time is being wasted and that more effort should have been put into this. Especially since I bought the book new.
Number Four: The girls meet Drummond
If you’ll recall from the synopsis, Drummond is the magic book librarian, and he is also after the Book of Doors. When Cassie and Izzy are at the diner eating pancakes and bacon, Drummond approaches them. Cassie actually recognizes Drummond from when she was teleporting around NYC, which means that people definitely saw her using the Book of Doors. She accuses him of following her, but he says that it was just a coincidence that they’re at the same diner. As the reader, you know that Drummond is telling the truth because you’ve read a few chapters from his POV, but Cassie has no way to know that. Yet, she believes him anyway, God knows why. She notes that he looks tired, disheveled, is somewhere in his forties, and kind of handsome. So, alarm bells are ringing in my head at this point. I can see the romance subplot coming, and I don’t want it. Again, Cassie is in her twenties. She should be at the club, not dating a 40-year-old man. Just a reminder that Brown is 45, and he and Drummond are both Scottish. I sure hope Drummond isn’t a self-insert for anyone.
Luckily, we’re saved from anything happening between them when Barbary, one of the main villains, enters the diner. He’s a book hunter who has a history with Drummond, and he’s come to take Drummond’s magic books. He starts attacking everyone in the diner to get to Drummond, and Cassie uses the Book of Doors to open a portal to France. Izzy, to her credit, does try to get Cassie to leave Drummond in the diner, but all three get through the portal. Once they’re safely in France, they instantly get over their apprehension once Drummond buys them croissants. He explains who Barbary is as the girls gush about how good the croissants are. He also tells them no one knows how the magic books were created, that one day they just appeared, and there’s a whole underground community dedicated to finding them, with the Book of Doors being the most rare and special book of all. Because of course, Cassie is special enough to have found the most special book.
Then they all go back to the girls’ apartment, and Drummond decides Izzy has seen too much and that it’s too dangerous for her to be involved. So, he uses one of his magic books to wipe her memory. Cassie is horrified by this, but she gets over it pretty quickly and decides to go with Drummond to find his lost magic book library. If Cassie was smart or had any sort of survival instincts, she would be wondering what the odds were that Drummond would erase her memory once he got what he wanted from her. But, because she’s an idiot, the thought never occurs to her. It also never occurs to Cassie that she’s leaving Izzy alone in NYC with no knowledge of the danger she’s in while Barbary is still on the loose. I sure hope nothing bad happens to her.
Number Five: The Woman is a one-dimensional villain
Around the time Cassie abandons Izzy, we’re introduced to the book’s main antagonist, the woman. And yes, Brown actually spells it like that, with a lowercase w. Usually, when you have a character that uses a title in place of a name, the first letter is capitalized because it’s still a proper noun. So not only is Brown breaking grammar rules by keeping that w lowercase, he’s also adding a layer of confusion. A fair amount of characters in this novel are women, so having a character be called “the woman” could make it kind of unclear who’s doing what. For the sake of clarity, I’ll be referring to her as “the Woman.”
Anyway, the Woman is also on the hunt for magic books because she wants to make people suffer. According to her, her life’s purpose is to bring about as much pain as possible. She likes to torture people and experiment with killing them in creative ways using the books. The chapters centered around her take a hard turn away from anything else in the book; they include a lot of body horror, and the tone is more sinister and serious. Since a majority of this book is characters talking out loud to themselves, descriptions of food, and Cassie making the worst decisions possible, I was always shocked whenever the narrative returned to the Woman. They feel like excerpts from a completely different book, but it’s not one I’d necessarily rather read. Her chapters got a little stale after a while because so much of the prose was about how she was evil and just wanted to do evil things.
I honestly don’t know why Brown decided to include her POV at all. It’s made very clear she’s not a sympathetic villain, and she’s not supposed to be. Usually, books include the antagonist’s POV to show more about them, their motivations, their backstory, etc., which makes them more complex and explains their actions. It might even humanize them a little bit. The Book of Doors doesn’t do that with the Woman. Her chapters are just here to tell us how twisted and evil she is and how she wants to kill everyone. I kept waiting for her backstory, and we finally got it within the last few chapters. But at that point, the story was already over, so it didn’t matter. My takeaway from it was that basically everything that happened was Cassie’s fault. I’m not sure if Brown wanted me to come to that conclusion, but I found it funny.
I think Brown wanted the Woman to be this sadistic, world-destroying, big bad. But when her only character trait is evil and her main motivation is to be eviler, she comes across as extremely flat and boring. She was also supposed to be smart and cunning, but Cassie managed to beat her, and Cassie’s an idiot.
Number Six: Time travel and Cassie’s wasted years
Not only can the Book of Doors transport the user to wherever they want to go, but it can also transport them to whenever they want to go. It can be used to open a door to the past, and Drummond theorizes their world has a fixed timeline. So, whatever happens in the past is not going to change the future because it’s already happened and is already a part of the timeline. Cassie wastes no time putting his theory to the test by traveling back in time to see her grandfather before he dies, and, luckily, Drummond was right about the timeline not changing. They also go back ten years, so Drummond can see his friends before the Woman kills them. When they get back to Cassie’s apartment in the present, they find that Barbary is there and Izzy is missing. Cassie doesn’t close the portal to the past for some reason and ends up losing the Book of Doors in a fight with Barbary, then gets thrown through the portal and trapped in the past. In the past, she finds John, her favorite customer from the bookstore, and convinces him to help her. She ends up crashing at his place, and after a few months—yes, months—she realizes she won’t be able to find the Book of Doors and will have to live out ten years before naturally catching up to the events of the story.
During my read-through, it was at this point I started thinking about Cassie and Drummond’s ages again. In case I haven’t mentioned it enough, Cassie is in her 20s right now, and Drummond is in his 40s. So, by the time Cassie catches up to the present, they’ll be a lot closer in age, and it would be more socially acceptable for them to be in a relationship. This is certainly one way to get around the age gap, but it also made me want to scream. Thankfully, though, I think Brown forgot about the romance subplot he started to hint at because they never get together. So, crisis averted, I guess.
Anyway, back to the time travel stuff. Cassie plans to get back to her apartment the second her past self gets thrown through the portal so she can take down Barbary. If I knew I had ten years to prepare for a fight, I would buy a gun. I’m not a Second Amendment advocate by any means, but I think Cassie’s situation calls for desperate measures. Maybe I just had that thought because I’m American, and Brown is Scottish, so maybe it never occurred to him that this would be something Cassie could do. At the very least, I would take some self-defense classes and spend all my time learning about the magic books and the underground societies. But Cassie, because she’s an idiot who can’t listen to me, does nothing. Well, she goes on a lot of walks and becomes better friends with John, but that’s not going to help her in a fight. She also briefly meets one of John’s associates, a man named Morgenstern. I refuse to believe Brown just happened to name-drop the author of The Night Circus, which this book was unfairly compared to. I see exactly what he’s doing, and he will never be her.
During the ten years, Cassie doesn’t make any friends other than John; she doesn’t go out and see the world; she doesn’t fall in love with someone her own age; she doesn’t gain any new experiences. She just waits around for the past to catch up to the present. For the reader, this time passes in a few pages, but it’s supposed to be a decade for Cassie, and that’s a long time to sit around and do nothing. These are ten years she’s never going to get back, and it’s frustrating that we don’t see any character growth in this time. Not to mention it feels like my time is being wasted with this, and I’ve been cheated out of something more interesting happening. She essentially just puts her whole life on pause for the plot. It’s not until less than a year before the fight that Cassie finally starts researching magic books and tries to cobble together a plan to save Izzy. When she does catch up to the present, she manages to take Barbary’s gun away from him and remarks that she’s never fired a gun before and doesn’t know how to use it. If only she had time to learn. Somehow, she’s able to make a lucky shot and win.
Number Seven: Barbary’s random bigotry
By the time Cassie’s second apartment fight with Barbary rolls around, he’s popped up a few times, so we have a pretty good feel for his character. Like the Woman, he’s another one-dimensional villain who wants magic books because of their power, and he will kill to get them. He doesn’t have much of a master plan and mostly seems content to be a thorn in the main characters’ side. During the second fight, he reveals he is also, apparently, racist and misogynistic. Now, when he talks about a woman, he calls them a bitch, and he uses some racial slurs. This really came out of nowhere and was inconsistent with my knowledge of the character. During all of Barbary’s previous encounters, he never said or did anything bigoted. In no way is Brown glorifying the use of misogynistic or racist terms, and I don’t think Barbary reflects Brown’s views at all. But the nature of the things Barbary said and the randomness of them make me think Brown wanted us to know that Barbary was bad, and he went about it in the most ham-fisted way possible. You know, in case we didn’t already pick up on that when Barbary killed a diner full of people. Bigoted villains can be done, and can be done well, but in this case Brown lacks the subtly to pull it off.
Barbary also goes on this whole sexist monologue about how society started going downhill when women became equal to men, and he wants to go back to the good old days when it was okay to physically abuse them, specifically the 1970s. Usually when insane men talk about the “good old days,” they mean the 1950s. The 70s weren’t perfect for women by any means, but women had more rights, and more laws were being passed to protect them in America, like Title IX and Roe v. Wade. Plus, speaking out against domestic violence was somewhat less taboo in the 70s than in the 50s, and so was divorce. But Barbary had to say the 70s because Cassie decides to give him a taste of his own medicine instead of killing him. She uses the Book of Doors to open a portal to the 70s and pushes Barbary through. Funnily enough, before he goes through, he says she should kill him because he will hunt her down if he lives. I hope that’s not foreshadowing anything, especially since we know it’s possible for a character to catch back up to the present.
Number Eight: The creation of the books
Cassie, Drummond, Izzy, and some side characters who Izzy has been with, but I didn’t feel like mentioning, all attend a magic book auction. Barbary shows up. Who could have seen that one coming? Unlike Cassie, he spent his time wisely and is thoroughly prepared. He even brought a gun with him. Someone uses a magic book to free Barbary of his pain, but it creates a physical manifestation of it, and Cassie pushes him through another portal to the past. At the end of the book, it’s revealed that Barbary’s pain infected the Woman while she was a child and made her evil. So, it was kind of Cassie’s fault because she refused to kill him multiple times, making every subsequent thing that happened in this book also her fault. In the present, the Woman also shows up at the auction. Chaos ensues as everyone tries to fight her using their magic books, and Izzy gets shot and dies. Cassie is so distraught by this that she uses the Book of Doors to transport herself to a place outside of space and time. There, she is instinctually able to physically manifest parts of herself and chooses to shape them as books because she’s not like the other girls and loves books. Then, she pushes the books out into the real world, and they randomly appear on the timeline.
This entire novel we’ve been told how special these magic books are and that their origin is a mystery, but it must be pretty special too. Therefore, only someone equally as special and magical could have created them. But I saw this as just another lazy attempt to make Cassie interesting. It’s like I’m being told repeatedly how interesting and special she is, but all I’ve been shown for the past 300 pages is how annoying and foolish she actually is. Really the only thing that’s believable about this part of the novel is that instead of sticking around and dealing with the situation at hand, Cassie wastes time doing something else while the other characters handle it.
Number Nine: The illusion of permanent consequences
I lied. Izzy’s not actually dead. She used a magic book to make it look like she died. So, she’s fine, and I’m sure that if I cared about the characters, I’d be happy to find this out. But I don’t, so I just feel like my time is being wasted. Stuff like this happens a lot: something bad happens only for it to get undone a few pages later. Like when Drummond wiped Izzy’s memory; she was amnesic for a few chapters but then regained her memories of all the important plot points. Other than Cassie getting stuck in the past, which only lasts for a few pages, bad things do not stick for the characters. If they get hurt, it doesn’t matter because they’ll be healed in a few chapters. If they lose, it doesn’t matter because they’ll win in a few chapters. What’s the point of Izzy losing her memories if she’s just going to get them back? What’s the point of Izzy dying if she’s just going to immediately come back to life? It feels like there are no stakes because there are no consequences for them losing. And if there are no stakes, why should I care about the plot? Well, actually, we’re told that the Woman getting the Book of Doors will be terrible. But that terror feels so far away because we never get to experience permanent consequences.
On that note, the gang decides to set a trap for the Woman and lure her back to the site of the auction. They fight and finally defeat the Woman once and for all. Yay… Not to undermine the gang’s victory, but I feel like having two back-to-back confrontations, in the same location no less, did not need to happen. I think there could have been one showdown, which would have made this book at least 50 pages shorter. Instead of The Book of Doors being the typical Freytag’s pyramid with only one peak for the climax, there are two and some other random bumps. This greatly affected the pacing and made me feel like I was being yanked around just so Brown could say he wrote a 400-page novel. In the final pages, the gang goes to Drummond’s magic book library and decides to stay together to protect the magic books. They also point out some of the more dangerous magic books are missing. God, I hope this isn’t hinting at a sequel.
Number Ten: The acknowledgments
By the time I finished The Book of Doors, I was miserable and mad, and I needed to see who was responsible for putting this out into the world. This was where I found out The Book of Doors had not one editor but two, and neither of them caught or cared about Cassie smiling to herself three times on one page. And was there not one woman in the room who objected to how the women in this novel were portrayed? When Brown thanks his agent, he remarks that his agent often told him that his drafts didn’t have enough wonder in it. Honestly, that’s similar to how I felt reading the final product. I wanted more. In many ways, this published book felt like a draft. The characters were flat and had no real growth, there were too many plot points that could have been condensed, the pacing was all over the place, the dialogue was clunky, and the characters weren’t realistic, likeable, or interesting. The most frustrating part about this is that The Book of Doors had the potential of being good. I keep going back to the synopsis and thinking about what could have been. There’s a story here, but the delivery fell short in every way.
In conclusion, and I know that makes me sound like a middle schooler writing their first-ever essay, I would not recommend this book to anyone unless they were looking for something to hate-read. This was not a book that was so bad it was funny, nor was it something I even loved to hate. Reading it filled me with rage, and talking about it worked me up all over again. If you want to feel similar negative things or see if I was making up how bad this is, go ahead and try it. I did spoil all the major plot points, but there’s still a lot I left out.
Throughout this post, I kept saying that I felt like The Book of Doors was wasting my time. Maybe it got a little repetitive at some point, but I meant it every time I said it. I wanted to clearly illustrate how it failed its most basic task: to entertain me. Finishing a book should not feel like a chore or an exercise in patience, both of which I experienced with The Book of Doors. I’ve read books I didn’t enjoy before, but even those had some element that gave me a reason to keep reading. With The Book of Doors, I was running off of pure spite and probably some amount of self-hatred.
The one good thing I can take away from this read experience is that if Gareth Brown can get published, surely, I can too. And it’s probably impossible for me to read a worse book in 2025.
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