It’s a strange day when Cole starts teleporting between doors. He could never do it before, and now that he is he doesn’t know how to deal with it. More than that, the cutest boy in school has decided that Cole is the one who he wants to talk to now that he’s questioning his sexuality.
The second half of that would normally make me put the book down, but there’s ace rep in this book and I wanted to give it a chance, even if it’s only in a side character. And the first half was interesting enough that I wanted to see what was going on and how they dealt with it.
The story is interesting. It is structured a little like a paranormal romance, with the bulk of the supernatural stuff happening in the last third of the book1 but it is interspersed decently throughout. I thought there were a few times when it could have come back into play a little sooner to make the personal drama and the supernatural stuff work a little more together and it felt less like everything happened all at once at the end. At least, introduce the concept of who the bad guys were a little earlier so they weren’t just looming mystery figures until the end, then reveal the secret society in the last couple chapters.
With the background of the Rainbow Club, the sheer amount of representation that is in the book feels like it makes sense for the narrative. I really liked how they dealt with the different sexualities, the race stuff, the gender stuff, the disabilities in the book. Namely, they didn’t. The story was not about any of them, so they existed in the book without it stopping everything to explain what asexuality was, or enby or how you should be treating deaf people. They just existed in the story and when it was brought up, it was brought up in a way that makes sense.
For instance, the love interest, Malik, has the exact same reaction to being ambiguously brown as I did as a kid. And I greatly appreciate it.
The only time there’s any explaining is done in the context of the narrative. A character thinks they might like boys and girls, but is confused about the distinction about bi and pan. Which Cole doesn’t have an answer to, so he looks it up and asks about it. It makes sense in the context of the story.
And, because I came here to see the ace character, I liked him a lot. Particularly in how it’s dealt with, namely that someone in the queer community had a problem with it which made him veer away from the community, and the bridges being repaired were done without much fanfare. The situation is more accurate to my experience, and the lack of focus on that resolution works well in the narrative because it isn’t his story. Alec’s story getting more attention than it did would have felt like a distraction to the main plot.
I really enjoyed this book. The story of the teleporting through doors and how Cole dealt with it was interesting and Cole as a character is different than a lot of other ones I’ve been exposed to in the past. Namely, he’s not spontaneous2 and has multiple hobbies, which makes him feel much more rounded as a character. It’s a bit more romance-y than I typically like, but I didn’t feel like the romance was a distraction from the main plot, and I had fun with it overall.