The Portal to Arroyo Sereno: 1

A bookshop that wasn't there yesterday. A door that leads somewhere it shouldn't. And a woman who has spent her whole life making herself easy to overlook - about to be seen.Calla Flint has a gift for noticing what other people would rather ignore - which is exactly why she's just lost her job, rescued an extremely ungrateful pigeon, and has nowhere in particular to be on a Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco.Then a cat with very firm opinions leads her down a North Beach alley to a bookstore that wasn't there yesterday.Behind its door is a tunnel. Behind the tunnel is Arroyo Sereno - a village tucked into a hidden valley where gardens grow on purpose, notebooks are taken seriously, and no one asks Calla to explain herself, apologize for her sharp edges, or be smaller than she is. For a woman who has spent her whole life making herself easy to overlook, it is the most unsettling kindness she has ever been offered.It is also not as peaceful as it looks.Something old has been sleeping beneath the valley's lake for fifteen years - held there, not healed, by a promise the village made and then quietly stopped keeping. As craft starts failing in careful hands and the water begins to rise, Calla finds herself doing the one thing she swore she'd never do again: caring enough about a place to stay and fix what's wrong with it.This will appeal to readers of Travis Baldree, T.J. Klune, and Becky Chambers - anyone who loves found family, gentle stakes, and villages (or coffee shops) that feel like home.Cozy, curious, and full of cats with their own agendas, The Threshold to Arroyo Sereno is the first book in a series about the doors we don't expect to find - and the homes that wait quietly on the other side of them.

Pagina's: 314, Paperback, Kit Sanders