A Hall of Keys and No Doors

3,5 stars rounded up because of cats.

It is a good, heartwarming story about a woman trying to find herself after a death of her twin brother. Action takes place three years after the tragedy but Ella is still a shade of herself, though it seems as she moved forward, because she has her new loft and a good job. Everything changes when she inherits her gradma house with a hall full of keys. As it happens, the keys have magical power and they can bring good or bad luck.

This novel touches upon a two important aspects: tolerance and family. Our protagonist goes thorugh a lot of sad, but also a lot of happy moments, searching for her place in life and her real family. At the end it was a little too like a fairytale for me, , but overall I liked it. It is a good novel for long, winter evening.

I was caught from the first page. A story about family, and about the family we choose. About tolerance. With an old house, a couple of adorable cats, a frog named Prince and a bit of woo-woo. Loved it!

Thank you to BHC Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this gentle, quiet story about grief and loss, and how family and friend relationships can help and hurt. The heroine's character and arc were wonderful and relatable, and I felt the author did a great job of drawing you into a world where inexplicable things happened. Highly recommended!

I loved this novel which is a perfect weaving of magical realism and contemporary fiction. There is much wisdom here about life and the journeys we all are on- journeys that include sun and light and good things as well as loss and hurt and destruction. There are also a few love stories mingled in for good measure! All characters felt completely real to me, and I particularly loved the scene where Ella encounters an elephant at the zoo. A powerful story about the choices we make and don’t make.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This has interesting and unique characters and is an easy read. I chose this for the story, etc., not the LGBTQ aspects, and it worked for me. I don't read a lot of fantasy, but enjoyed this one.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!

I loved the front cover! It is becauee of the title and front cover I picked that book to read.
I did not regret it.
It was magical, bittersweet, and heartbraking at times.
The book touches aspects of grief and loss. It includes some romance. It has a lot of interesting turns too.
Sold 4.5 stars!

Do you know how sometimes you'll finish the last sentence of a book and think, "This was magic. Pure magic"? This is what happened to me with this book. Although slow to start – what a satisfying book and what a strong ending. Really left my heart full.

A Hall of Keys and No Doors is a poignant story about letting go, forgiving yourself and learning to live with loss and grief. With quite a healthy dose of magical realism in the mix as well!

It was slow, and I mean really slow to start, as it took me half of the book to get into it! But not in the sense that stuff wasn’t going on. It was, and plenty of it, but I wasn’t at all invested in the book for at least half of it.

But then I kept reading anyway, and I’m so glad I did. The ending was so powerful it almost made my cry, and there was also a lot of emotionally charged stuff by the end as well (I even got so indignant about some of the characters!)

I feel like this book will stay with me. I’m still pondering some of the decisions the characters made. I can definitely recommend it, but I must say, just stick with it. It may take you a while to get into it if you’re like me, but its well worth it.

The story has some serious triggers – like losing a sibling, being cast out by your family, being abused because of being queer, losing a job. There’s loads of guilt thrown around, so it isn’t exactly an easy read.

But that’s what makes the ending so strong for me – and I’m not going to spoil it, but the end boils down to one very big, but mostly philosophical question: if you could undo all of the bad stuff that ever happened – would you?

All the loss and the pain, the guilt could be gone, but… Then wouldn’t all the good things that came out of them be gone too?

The characters are weighing these two things in order to make their choice. And despite the fact that real life doesn’t usually have these magical realism elements which could actually allow you to make a choice like that, I find that a lot of us probably spend considerable amounts of time pondering such a choice as well. Don’t we? At least I know I do, and that’s why this book resonated with me. The bottom line is that good comes with the bad, and there is just no way we can take these two apart – they are two sides of the same coin.

There are more things to A Hall of Keys and No Doors that will resonate with readers – like the fact that the main character is bisexual and is so tired of how straight people think she’s a straight person who is experimenting, and the gay people take her to be a lesbian who just hasn’t made up her mind yet. There is also quite a bit about how coming out, especially without wanting to, can be devastating on the family ties, especially if that family is very religious. I loved how these topics are not central – which normalizes them and makes them just a part of the story, a part of normal life. (By the way, there are way more than just one queer character as well.)

There is, of course, also romance! The romance is not central, but it is adorable and sweet, and I felt like it was just the right amount of it in the story. And there is a considerable amount of various family drama which basically tore my heart out, but was very well placed. And in the midst of it all, there’s lasting friendship! A Hall of Keys and No Doors is a very rich book and I can truly only recommend it.

Please visit my blog for triggers because there are no spoiler tags here on NetGalley.

I thank the publisher for giving me a free copy of the ebook in exchange to my honest review. This has not affected my opinion.

Ella Keyes teaches at a university and is struggling with the death of her grandmother Helen who she is very close to. Some years earlier she had also lost her twin brother Stuart and still misses him everyday.
Surprisingly she finds her grandmother has left her the house which is an old rambling place with a collection of keys hanging on the wall on the third floor. Some are shiny and polished, some are knobbly, tarnished and weird looking.
It's when Ella moves into the house that she discovers that these keys seem to have some fantastical properties that directly affect her life.
I usually avoid the fantasy genre but this tale is told in a very realistic way with the relationships between family members and friends at its core. There are several mysteries going on that Ella must unravel too all of which helped to engage me thoroughly so that I enjoyed this story much more than I was expecting.