Innovative, creative and exciting. This was a lovely written book with colourful characters and exciting adventures. Can't wait to read more.

This book is a sweet but confusing portal fantasy with a fairly heavy-handed moral about believing in yourself. River and her twin sister Kit discover the land of RALA, where their great aunt Violet seems to have become a figure of legend. River must learn to accept Violet's legacy and understand her own power in order to deal with the strange and wonderful dangers of RALA...

There are some lovely ideas in this book (I particularly liked the imagination garden, where you could plant anything you could conjure up in your mind), but as a whole, it's rather confused. I never got a good picture of what RALA was like - there is almost no functional world-building. There's no concept of society, or what any of the characters they meet do in their normal lives, when not helping River to find herself. A map may have been useful, as River's quest takes her to a few locations and then back to the beginning, without any sense of direction or realistic travel. I also found the dialogue fairly stilted, and the point of view is unstable - most of the time the writing is in third person limited perspective, so we get River's thoughts, but fairly often the narrator jumps to an omniscient style of writing to explain someone's thoughts or to show something else happening, which is messy to read. She also allows River to guess other people's thoughts, which is a cop-out when writing third person limited.

Overall, I think there are some nice ideas here, but the execution doesn't hold up, I'm afraid.

I have said before I do not like journey books, so I'm going to state this again, so that if those are the types of books you like, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary).

This is the story of two sisters who find a magical land beyond a forbidden room, and through a window.

They meet talking trees and giants, and all sorts of magical things. They learn to believe in themselves, and they solve a mystery.

But, the story is told omnipotent third-person, with foreshadowing. If you don't mind this, then you will probably enjoy reading this quick little book. I like to not be told everything that is going to happen, on the other hand.

The dialogue is a little stiff, for my tastes, though the moral of the story is fine and good.

The problem was, I never felt engaged with the two sisters, and frankly, didn't much care that they weren't getting along, or in the end they did.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.