>the library door creaks open and you catch a glimpse of tall, dusty bookshelves.
>do you enter? [yes] no
>you pick up a notebook from a shelf, and the whole thing is full of spoilers. goddamit
summary: In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book.
This book follows January Scallar, who is living under the thumb of her father's employer (Mr. Locke) while her father goes searching for mysterious objects and 'doors", aka portals to other worlds. He is employed by a mysterious Society, which is ostensibly a group of rich white guys who collect exotic objects but is actually dedicated to the destruction of these doors in order to "maintain a stable society", which on the face of it seems a little bit silly because incredibly few people in the world know about these doors in the first place and it doesn't seem to be threating Earth in any way. But considering that this is a group of white men in the 1900s, I buy it. January slowly becomes disillusioned about the nature of reality and also about the humiliating and racist way Mr. Locke has treated her and her father, and the second half of the book is her mission to find her father and stop the Society in their mission.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. YA usually doesn't hit for me, but I found this to be well-written and interesting. I don't have much to say about the character of January, but I enjoyed following her story. I'm a big fan of stories where characters have to learn about the world at the same time as the reader, which there was a lot of in this book, though there aren't really any big "twists" in this story. It's pretty obvious Mr. Locke is the villain even though January thinks he's just unaware of what the Society is doing. The main way January learns about the world is by reading a mysterious book titled "the 10,000 doors" which turns out to be her father's notebook and gets more and more worrying and dark towards the end, so it parallels January's story in an interesting way.
I'm tempted to say that I wanted to see more of the other worlds, but I think the glimpses we got were probably the right amount. I'm just always curious when I hear an interesting concept. I gave this 4 ish stars. I think it's a solid book. I recommended it to some of my friends who are more into this genre than me.