In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut.
In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.
Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.
Lush and richly imagined, a tale of impossible journeys, unforgettable love, and the enduring power of stories awaits in Alix E. Harrow’s spellbinding debut–step inside and discover its magic.

In a world where doors are not just doors, and there isn’t world but worlds, the power of words is bigger than January Scaller has imagined. But words are just ink on the paper, right? Anyone might find her a spoiled and pappered child, soft after years of living under prudent care in Cornelious Locke’s household, but the truth is – she’s sad. She is sad and lonely, always falling down that void that her father left after every time he departed to another “bussines” trip. No amount of books she read, or the times she played with Samuel could fill that void, but as she grows, the worlds seem to… shift a bit for her. It has always been there, from the moment she found that blue door leading to the unknown, and the coin with foregin woman’s face on it. But it’s not real, she should forget that the told her. From time to time, there is that feeling that she might be more than obedient daughter and Locke’s colored doll to dress up for his parties. Her dog and best friend Bad and her new nanny Jane make her time less lonely, but her life stops to a halt after she receives news of her father’s death and the time comes for her to question everything she’s been told and taught. But the truth lies in the book she wasn’t supposed to read and behind the doors, she wasn’t supposed to open.


Harrow’s wonderful writing makes this book less like reading, and more like gliding through the words and stories. January’s eloquent and picturesque narrative is intercepted with chapters from her father’s book that tells a story of the Doors and magnificent worlds behind them. This book is an atlas in words, filled with beautiful places and landscapes, effortlessly taking its readers through space and time. I have mixed feelings about parallel worlds/universe, but Harrow created a concept that simply couldn’t be messed up. Her worlds don’t change in time and aren’t connected to each other by anything but doors. There are places where those worlds touch or overlap and those places are Doors, but aside from that, they are each a story of their own. This beautiful, inspiring and heartbreaking story about loyalty, family and love that is stronger than time and magic really warmed my heart and woke a bone-deep sense of satisfaction and belonging.

This book is filled with beautiful phrases and igniting moments, but I still found it kind of boring-ish. It’s not the boredom that hits you right away and gets you hating the book right at the beginning – it is that slow, painful sense of something missing that slowly crawls into your mind until you can’t stop thinking about the lacking of some crucial part. In this case – the plot. I think this has something more to do with me not being into YA so much rather than the book itself, but still… I wish I’d had nothing bad to say about this book, but the fact that I had a hard time reading it doesn’t change how beautifully it was written. It makes me sad that I seem to slowly leave some genres that I used to love behind, but who knows maybe it’s just a slump.