Welcome to Litsy!

I adore adore adore this book. One of my favorite tropes is “young girl goes through the door to another world” and this fit the bill perfectly. The longing of being separated from one you love really got to me. I made my mom read it and texted me from a commercial flight saying she was blubbering on the plane. She felt the full range of emotions that I felt with this book. And the cover 😍

I picked up this book to escape from the day and what a perfect choice it was. I love the idea of another world being a very literal door away. There was magic and intrigue and discovering something your soul always knew.

February #bookspin completed ✔️ @TheAromaofBooks

This novel feels similar to Starless Sea w/the same slow-burn story. I savored the descriptions and I know I'll return to it. The world-building is wonderful & the ending makes it all worthwhile. I loved so many of the supporting characters. It could have benefitted from some editing, but give yourself time to enjoy the portals into other worlds, secret society, diverse cast, epic love, and dangerous escapes and you won't be disappointed.

It‘s a feel good kind of fantasy that is engaging and in the realm of a love story.

It's a whole lot trickier to find flowers in bloom on the first of January, but I couldn't resist trying for this cover. Would that I was as pleased with the interior as the exterior. I love the Fractured Fables novellas, but I think the key component is brevity. Even when she introduces difficulties and poor choices, all part of a young adult character's growth, one is comforted by the page count that the resolution can't be that far away.

This is my #BookSpin January list. @TheAromaofBooks

I honestly don‘t know what to write here.
I didn‘t read this book as fast as I do some others but that‘s not to say I didn‘t enjoy it. In fact, I loved this book and its storyline as well as the way it was written (though I had my doubts at first). I particularly loved the way everything fit together perfectly and of course the characters!
4⭐️

I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

I don‘t need these blessings translated. I can read them myself, in plainest English: To home. To true love. To Adelaide.

That what was shattered will be made while again.

“Freedom isn‘t worth a single solitary shit if it isn‘t shared.”

There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.

Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.

But now I was free. Free to hate him, free to run from him, free to write my own story.

It had both changed and not changed in the last decade. So had the world, I supposed.

It turns out that only in loving you am I brave enough to leave you.

I am my own keeper now.

I might be young and untried and penniless and everything else, but -I clutched the pen in my hand until my knuckles were white crests- I was not powerless.

I believed in the black gleam of the ink in the night, in the strength of my own fingers wrapped around the pen, in the reality of that other world waiting just on the other side of some invisible curtain. I believed in second chances and righted wrongs and rewritten stories. I believed in Samuel‘s belief.

It felt like donning a suit of armor or sprouting wings, extending past the boundaries of myself; it felt an awful lot like love.

“If you are willing to try, I believe in you. Strega.”

“Maybe I did not make myself clear before, when I said I was on your side. I meant also that I would be at your side, to go with you into every door and danger, to run with you into your tangled-up future. For” -and a distant part of me as gratified to note that his voice had gone wobbly and strained-“for always. If you like.”

“I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and men are mostly cowards.” He looked directly at me as he finished, with a kind of raised-chin boldness that said: I am not a coward.

“You did not need rescuing, then, it seems,” he said, a wry twist in his smile. “Stregas rescue themselves in all the stories.”
“Stregas?”
“Witches.”

“Bad is on your side.”
My smile sturdied. “Yes.”
“And,” he said more softly, “so am I.”

Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.

Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerised by the sight of our own broken hearts.

“I didn‘t want to be safe, I suppose. I wanted to be dangerous, to find my own power and write it on the world.”

“Our girl will be a fairy tale before she can walk.”

“Trying to explain things that can‘t be explained is how you get stories and fairytales.”

"It‘s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you‘re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go."

Do I regret it? Would I take it back, if I could? Tell her to resign herself to home and hearth, to give up her wandering ways? It depends which weighs more: a life, or a soul.

You don‘t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.

My father was a scholar: his tools were careful study and rational evidence and years and years of documentation.
My tools were words and will, and I was out of time.

True love is not stagnant; it is in fact a door, through which all kinds of miraculous and dangerous things may enter.

They are the beginnings and endings of every true story…

One does not fall in love; one discovers it.

Even I must admit that love is not always graceful.

On Love.