"After Jonathan Lambshead’s
elusive grandfather dies, the recently orphaned teenager inherits the family
mansion—and its contents. Jonathan soon discovers that the mansion’s basement
holds more than just oddities: three doors serve as portals, with one leading
to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where magic abounds, history has been
re-written, and an occult dictator called Aleister Crowley leads an army
pillaging alt-Europe. Jonathan learns of his destiny as a member of The Order,
a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora, and embarks
on an epic quest to protect Earth from Crowley’s dark magic."
Can’t say I actually liked
this book. I found it tedious, bloated, even when I found it clever and
sometimes funny here and there. Still, I could not get over the ludicrous prose
style and its (seemly) drug-fueled hallucinogenic plot that seemly wanted to
emulate Charles Dickens worst aspects. By setting it in an alternate universe –the
magic door portal trope- of Aurora, VanderMeer’s tale gets odder and weirder,
but much of this 600 plus page novel for Young Adults could’ve been trimmed or
spread over a trilogy instead of what seems to be a duology. And maybe had it
been this way, the books faults would not be so obvious to me.
The verbose style was just too
dense for me and it made me wonder how a teenager today, brought up on TikTok,
Instagram, and ignoring their parents, would feel about it, because it felt like
a real chore to finish it.
The fact it took me nearly a
month to get through this book, even skimming through the last 35%, speaks
volumes on how I’ll probably not read the second book when its released. This
is real problem I have with the fantasy genre of the last two decades or so,
where we get super long books for no real reason, where the editors are
allowing the writers too much latitude, and then get to the point of that book,
only to end it and ask the reader to return a year or so later for another huge
tome.
So I'm left wondering, sadly
what was the point of it all?
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