Readers who appreciate the worlds created by Philip Pullman, Jo Walton, Seanan McGuire, Charlie Jane Anders, Adrian Tchaikovsky and V.E Schwab will immediately enjoy immersion in Clay Kelly's Beyond the Doors, with its parallel Wards, versions of our world which have splintered off to follow separate trajectories. Adult Wardens seek to minimize instability in the linked superorganism of Wards, but only adolescent Rangers can navigate through the interstitial energies between Wards to place and maintain the Obcasix devices that preserve balance.

The first book in the promised trilogy begins on a ship taking young evacuees from 1940 London to safety in Canada, and executes basic world-building with the appearance of a Rift between Wards. The adult Wardens and four young Rangers are introduced, as is Eris, an opposing not-quite human entity that wants the Wards to split. The young Rangers begin to discover their unique capabilities as they engage with Eris and her minions--renegade Rangers and the alien Weevers. The Weevers are elegantly drawn and endowed: "they feed themselves, if you will, by taking your reality and feeding you delusion... if Weevers are allowed to continue to feed or if they don't have enough food, they will suck away your memory."

Along the way are some wonderful bits of naming (the most formidable of the Wardens is Philadenia Withersnips) and the vital presence of a pygmy possum named Newton. It's easy to imagine the TV serial, a circus for CGI and fully as riveting as Stranger Things, The Five, Locke & Key, and Carnival Row.

Left for the next volumes are the details of how Wards split off yet remain interdependent, of the origins and operation of the Obcasix, of Eris's motivation for fomenting the split, and of the Nether, where bits of the Wards land when they are dislodged. This reader eagerly anticipates the second volume.