I quite enjoyed this one, although at the ending I was very disappointed... but only because I wanted to read the stories of the character revisiting the world and rebuilding the doorways and etc.
I have always been a big sucker for portal fantasies, so I'm probably a pushover for this one. One of the great tragedies of the classical portal fantasy is that it all must end and then you have to live the rest of your life either forgetting the world of wonder, or worse remembering it and knowing you can never visit it again. There is something to that about growing up and leaving behind childish things, but is it really so bad to embrace those things that are considered childish? I mean, I can hold a job, pay a mortgage, raise a child, and I think I can do pretty well at those things if not perfectly. But I also write make-believe stories for a hobby after all and would happily do it for a living if I could find a way to make it steady.
Despite being a grown-up who embraces the make-believe, I remember an end of portal door time when I was a kid. Between 4th and 5th grade I moved from a city to a very very small town. The small town was very small, graduating class of about 30 people. And by the time I moved there all the social cliques were pretty much permanent unless one had a lot of social ability, which I didn't. So I spent the next 8 years pretty much miserable, trying to fit in with whoever would accept me. I had had a best friend in the city which was about an hour away, and we'd invented a pretend world on the playground, a portal sort of world. I constantly looked forward to visiting the city to play with him again and revisit that world and would manage it every few months. A couple years later, I distinctly remember a time when I went to his house and he wanted to play that world again, and the appeal had been completely lost on me, and I told him honestly that I had forgotten how. I'm not sure I've ever made anyone as sad as I made him in that moment by telling him that honest truth. I have since then found other portal doors to poke my head through, most recently in the form of inventing worlds by writing about them. For me that old portal door disappeared and I couldn't go through THAT one again. But there have been other doors for me, some by reading other people's stories or video games or whatever, but like the protagonist of this story, the biggest part for me is being willing and able to learn how to manufacture my own portal doors. Sometimes when the everyday grind of life makes me feel worn out, it still can bring back the wonder to remember that I can still sometimes make those doors. I'm looking forward to being able to share some of my own stories when my son's a little bit older, and maybe even see if he wants to help me build some doors himself.