Complicated thoughts about this book. It owes a lot to Alice in Wonderland, and I mean that both in a good way and a bad way. As in Alice, this book features a character falling down a rabbit hole into a whole new, magical, strange, beautiful, dangerous land. This land is full of tea, cats, owls, books, art, ruined architectural marvels, darkness, and decay. The lead character, grad student Zachary, meets various characters who shift in and out of the story, but the plot is loose and generally lacks urgency. Some readers will be perfectly content with this, and will be happy to wander the halls of the underground land for a long time, discovering interesting new tidbits. Other readers will chafe at the pacing and wonder when something is going to happen. I switched back from one to the other mood several times. The start of the book is especially slow, because every other chapter is a fairy tale, dividing up the sections about Zachary's New England J-term. Usually I love tales within tales, but the 1:1 ratio of story and interstitial material wasn't working for me. I was almost tempted to skip them and just read about Zachary, who is quietly gay, nerdy, and working on a thesis about story structures and game design when he finds a book in the library that contains a written scene from his own childhood. He follows a series of literary clues to figure out where the book came from, which eventually gets the story moving. Two movies I'd aesthetically compare this book to are Mirrormask and Labyrinth. If you loved those films, and like relaxing into a dreamy journey of a book, you might really love this one. But it didn't quite hit the spot for me.