Simile game: strong.
I really enjoyed this. Well written and extremely evocative. In terms of a portal story, it probably is fairly stock? but the prose are compelling enough to propel it along so it never felt like a slog. Had it been a bit more divergent in terms of stakes and “villain” it would have been a 5 star book.

The audiobook narration is —Fantastic— highly recommend consuming the book in that format.