The Portable Door

Rating:
Summary: barely passable
Review: Asprin + Carroll + Rowling + never-too-old story of an introvert falling in real love with an introversive second half. The story is not exactly up to the task on any front. It's not funny enough, not outlandish enough, not teenage-accessible enough and definitely not tear-jerking enough.
The only good thing the center of magical gravity is a door, not a carpet or a broom.
It would had been even heavier crossbreeding of others' ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Slow start, but very enjoyable!!
Review: I automatically give any book extra points for laugh-out-loud moments, and although there aren't that many in this book, they ARE present, esp with Mr. Tanner's mum around.

Paul Carpenter is having a bad day. Well, it's his first day of work at J.W Wells & co as a junior clerk, along with Sophie, a woman with all the [looks], as the books' cover tells you. Nevertheless,when Paul and Sophie forget the company's rule of leaving the building by 5:30p.m., they discover that things are not all they expected. The building's owned by goblins, for one thing.

And when one of the senior partners sets them to cleaning out and categorizing all the odd items in the basement (they find Scarlett o'Hara's birth certificate and the map to King Solomon's mines, among other things) Paul finds things getting weirder and weirder. For one thing, he meets the mother of one of the senior partners. Mr Tanner's mum is a highly engaging character.

Tom Holt is oft compared to Terry Pratchett, but since his novel is actually set in England, I found his characters using a lot more English slang than discworld characters would. Although this can be slightly uncomfortable at first, you soon get used to it as the story takes you on a log-ride of a plot, with slow moments, sudden twists and turns, and a final splash of a climax before you climb out of the story.

Paul seemed unutterably wimpy at first, even annoying sometimes, but about halfway through the book, I started feeling sorry for him, and then rooting for him, and he finally did grow a backbone and I was cheering for him all the way.

Read The Portable Door if you're looking for a light-hearted fantasy novel about 'The Corporation' and two clueless junior clerks in England. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected I would.