Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

Loved Bone Gap, and this was a Printz silver, so I wanted to like it more than I did. The parallel stories were sometimes a little jarring on who was narrating, and though there are many deep and emotional incidents happening and revealed to have happened, I never felt fully moved by or connected to the characters. I think part of the lack of engagement was that Ruby, in a book of ghosts and magical realism, hammered away at the main point so obviously that it detracted from the experience..

God, I love when I find fiction that reads like an emotion. This one's a ghost story and historical fiction at the same time, and I just. So good. There's a lot of catch-your-breath lines where it manages to express something so well that you have to pause for it.

Pros:
Beautifully written
Amazing strong female lead characters

Cons:
Dark and Sad
Not great for young readers.

I think I liked this? The writing was lovely but it took me a while to get into it. Not plot-driven but liked the commentary of women being there for women when life gives them the worst.

This is a really lovely book, on a sentence-level, and I loved the range of seldom-told historical stories encompassed here. I struggled a bit to understand how all the stories come together, but I do have a known mental block for magical realism (and magical realism-adjacent stories).

I won an ARC of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Historical fiction isn't a genre I gravitate toward, but something about this story had me interested enough to enter to win a copy.

It was fantastic. This is a story about girls, about loss, about love, about trauma, and about life. The balance between the two protagonists, whose stories are carefully interwoven and mirror each other in a lot of ways, is exceptional. The relationships feel real and complicated without being lost in the message Laura Ruby is trying to convey. She shows so many kinds of relationships and emotions. I find that authors often attempt to showcase one kind of relationship, such as terrible parents or wonderful parents, siblings who are best friends or siblings who hate each other, etc. But the relationships in this book hit all those notes, with some evolving throughout the story and others staying consistent. It feels very genuine and true to life, at least from my experiences.

Laura Ruby is a refreshingly subtle writer. That's not to say the issues the characters face are subtle (or even the “villains”), but the stance Ruby takes is clear without smacking the reader over the head with it. There's an obvious right and wrong, with clearly heinous acts and awful people, but we experience those through the emotions of the characters. She makes her characters very human, and they struggle in a realistic way. Their struggle is what the audience is supposed to learn from instead of Ruby spoonfeeding us what to think.

I think Ruby's subtlety as a writer is also demonstrated by her portrayal of female roles. Women could/were expected to fill a variety of fairly rigid societal, professional, and familial roles during the 1940s. It's easy to overlook how thoroughly these roles are represented, explored, and often challenged in this book, and that's because Ruby doesn't wave a flag and call attention to every detail she includes. She doesn't straight up say, “Look at how this person faced this consequence, isn't it awful?!” Instead, she shows the experiences of the characters and lets the audience draw conclusions from them. I very much appreciate that because it feels like she trusts the reader to recognize these things on their own.

I can't recommend this book enough and really hope to see more people pick it up. I'm definitely going to grab a finished copy for myself.

I've been in love with Ruby's writing since Bone Gap. This was a great story (actually a story within a story within a story) that I found to be both horrifying and charming. I listened to the audio book, it was fabulous.