The Door
The Door follows a teenager as she unearths her true identity in a high-speed adventure of good versus evil.
Craig Wickersham’s young-adult fantasy The Door is steeped in the supernatural and occult. The Door follows a teenager as she unearths her true identity in a high-speed adventure of good versus evil.
Because her mother died when she was young, seventeen-year old Luci Comburet lives with her grandmother in a trailer park in Arizona. The identity of Luci’s father is not known. When her grandmother passes away, Luci moves to Nevada to live with an uncle she has never met. Her arrival there sets in motion events that will upend her life in unimagined ways. She is thrust into the eternal war between the forces of good and evil, only to discover her true role in this war through an unexpected plot twist.
The story moves at a breakneck speed. The forward motion of the narrative is maintained through clever foreshadowing. Throughout the story, clues are provided, hinting that things might not be what they seem. However, this constant forward motion results in a story that is lacking an anchor.
Characters that are introduced as important end up being left by the wayside, and new relationships that are established turn out to be inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. Dangerous situations are solved before they are driven to their utmost points, often by the appearance of a quickly introduced solution and consequently without having placed the characters in any real peril. The categorizations of the different supernatural creatures that appear are insufficiently explained. Luci’s world ends up feeling not quite fleshed out.
The writing style is detached. Characters lack emotional depth, particularly during conflicts where their inner emotional turmoil is expressed through shouting dialogue. Past experiences are insignificant to the present situation, and newly gained experiences come to the characters too easily. Characters behave either inappropriately for their age or counterintuitively to how they were initially introduced. Translations of non-English conversations are awkward.
Even though The Door is told from Luci’s perspective, she is inconsistently drawn. The story rarely shows what is going on inside her head, and she is a difficult lead to grasp. She sometimes displays knowledge that exceeds her experiences, and she is inattentive to certain details. Her reactions to emotional situations range from indifference to hyperbole.
The story wraps up neatly with all of its puzzles and mysteries having been satisfactorily solved and with Luci growing toward a different place from where she began.
Delivering a new perspective on the fight between good and evil, the young-adult fantasy The Door moves too quickly to make a full emotional impact.
Reviewed by
Erika Harlitz Kern
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
