The Society of Unknowable Objects
The Book of Doors – standalone companion
❤️❤️❤️❤️
(Spoiler free)
This book caught me by surprise. I thought it was going to be a normal run-of-the-mill magic system, but I found myself wanting to know more at every step.
The book starts by laying out the rules of the society. There are a lot of rules, but they boil down to the same rules as Fight Club. Noone can talk about it except withing the society.
Our main character Magda Sparks is completely fine with this at first. She is just happy to be part of a magical society even if it is mostly boring. The society’s meetings are essentially three people sitting in a basement eating biscuits with tea and coming up with theories on where the supposed “unknowable objects” came from. I say supposed because Magda had only ever seen one when she was initiated.
Magda was fine with it this way, until they got a message that someone in Japan had found an object and she goes to collect it. Suddenly everything she’d ever known about the society and about her family comes crashing down around her.
Overall, this book was really well paced. There was never a moment where I was wishing to get to the next action scene. All the twists came at just the right time to keep me intrigued.
I liked a lot of the characters as well. They all had their motivations and even though this was a relatively short read compared to other fantasy books, I could clearly see character arcs for each of them.
There was one character, Will, that annoyed me in the beginning. I didn’t really like a lot of his actions, but as the story progressed he became more fleshed out in a way that was surprisingly realistic given the premise of this book.
Although he still annoyed me at the end a bit too.
My one gripe is that it felt like the romance in the book came out of nowhere. I’m just not one for instant love like how it was portrayed in this book. This wasn’t a romance-centric book, but the relationship still could have been more fleshed out. Especially since they were from two different countries.
Besides the romance, the ending was really satisfying in that it was messy. I like a book where the characters aren’t suddenly ok with everything they did over the course of the chapters. Magda has to make a lot of uncomfortable decisions and the weight of them sticks with her right ’til the end.
I would absolutely recommend anyone to go give it a read. Especially if you enjoy a good mystery adventure. I will say I didn’t realize it was a companion novel to The Book of Doors until I got to the epilogue that ties the two together. This is technically a standalone, but since they are a connected universe, I’m going to put this in both sections.
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