By Alix E. Harrow
I read most of this in mid-April 2024. Honestly, I couldn’t finish it. There’s a wonderful conceit there (and the ideas of thin spaces are cropping up in my thoughts much like those of memetics used to, with His Dark Materials and Edinburgh’s Greyfriars graveyard and some sci-fi stories) but the writing is twee and insufferable and so maddeningly unsubtle that it’s a chore to read.
The main character is unbelievably two-dimensional. Efforts have been made, you can tell, with inner conflicts and murmuring currents of motivation, but in the end, Harrow is just not that good a writer.
Even the main concept is poorly thought out and lacking in richness. Portals, doors to other worlds? What doors? Where do they go? Why are they randomly on Earth?
The only good parts, I felt, were the occasional sentences describing the shapes of the letters: D as an opening, beckoning you in. H as a bridge, J as a nose. Sparkles amidst the grey.