The Door at the End of the World, by Caroline Carlson

Tomorrow (April 9th) is the release day of Caroline Carlson's new middle grade fantasy, The Door at the End of the World, which I just a minute ago finished reading!  I wish there'd been more; the story galloped along briskly in that really nice middle grade fantasy adventure way of magical happenings and bright changes of scene and mood (with, you know, a herd of magically intelligent cows arriving on the scene, as they do) and then there was the peaceful gathering of loose ends (which is one of the parts I like best in mg fantasy), and then...the last page and it was over.  Sigh.

It's the story a girl named Lucy, who works for the gatekeeper of the door between the worlds of Southeast and East.  Lucy has never left Southeast herself, though she's taken care of the bureaucratic side of things for many travelers (she's a very organized sort of person).  But when the gatekeeper herself passes through, for a routine maintenance check with her counterpart in East, and doesn't come back, Lucy opens the door to see what's happening.  And instead of the gatekeeper, a boy from East falls through, and then the door won't open again.

So Lucy and Arthur, the Eastern boy, set out to try to find answers from the people who are supposed to be in charge.  What they find instead is a danger to the fabric of time and space.  Instead of the organized doors linking the various worlds, set comfortably apart and carefully maintined, one of the most powerful people in Southeast has a scheme for consolidating and controlling world travel all in one central hub (to the detriment of all the other worlds).  Joined by Rosemary, whose family smuggles contraband between the worlds,  Lucy and Arthur slowly put the pieces of the plot together.

But when the three kids have all the pieces, who will believe them?  And the pace of the story picks up rather dramatically at this point, involving a wild and wonderful chase from world to world (to a happy ending....)

The various worlds all have their own characteristics, some more magical and wonderous than others, and one that's essentially our own Earth.  Lucy's world is the most unremarkable of them all, and Lucy herself at first seems a very unremarkable character.  Fortunately, the premise of the story (the gates between the worlds) is right there at the beginning, so that even during the slow burn of the first part of the book, before the plot really thickens, the reader should be intrigued enough to trust that there will be excitements to come (which there are).

I fussed at the beginning of this post that I was grumpy that the book ended, but actually, I'm glad it did because I actually do like my mg fantasy to be nice, tight, and contained (I feel, without naming names, that some books are rather bloated).   The Door at the End of the World doesn't reach great peaks of emotion, and the secondary characters aren't all that deeply developed (though they were developed just fine for their purposes in the story), but I did not mind that either--if one is enjoying being carried along by a good story, often that is enough.

Short answer--I enjoyed reading it lots, and would happily recommend it to young readers (as young as eight or nine.  A horrible fate awaits one character, but the possibility of escape is left open, so it's not nightmarishly horrible).

Disclaimer: review copy received courtesy of the author.