Review of The Lost Portal by Lenore Borja

Gods and monsters and nightmares, oh my! The Lost Portal, a sequel to The Last Huntress, promises to be an epic quest. Lenore Borja returns us to the quartet of fierce huntresses: Alice, Soxie, Olivia, and Hadley. Amid affirmations of female friendship and explorations of family ties, these four women are all that stands between the Greek pantheon’s attempt to return to the world—or remake it in the process. The stakes are high—however, much like the first book, my reaction was more yawn than yay. I received a review copy of this book.

Spoilers for the first book but not for this one.

The Lost Portal follows Hadley this time, giving us a glimpse into her backstory: a grandfather and brother deep into a life of crime, a father who throws her brother out of the house, and a widening rift between brother and sister. Hadley has been determined to find sisterhood in her friends instead (a feeling I know all too well). Meanwhile, the gods won’t leave the huntresses alone. With the Mirror Realm destroyed, they have no way back into this world—but they can still plague the huntresses’ dreams. And they promise to do so forever unless the huntresses find for them the eponymous misplaced portal.

Look, I’m going to rip the Band-Aid off on this one: The Lost Portal does nothing to remedy my problems with The Last Huntress and indeed lacks much of the mythological charm that made the first book tolerable.

The switch in perspective from Alice to Hadley is a welcome change. However, it reminded me that we never really get to know the other huntresses all that much. Alice is fairly fleshed out having been the first book’s protagonist, though in this book her character is largely “sad girl vibes for David/Citheraeon, unsure about my mirror powers.” Hadley gets the protagonist treatment here and benefits. Olivia and Soxie? I dunno. Olivia likes animals and Soxie is … rich. Really, rich. Did you know Soxie has a lot of money? If you forget, the book will remind you every few paragraphs. That and she loves stiletto heels. Suffice it to say, these supposedly main characters are not as three-dimensional as I’d like.

The same goes, unfortunately, for the stakes and story in this book! I will give Borja some credit for changing up the setting and mixing in some actual history of Egypt. But even that is pretty thin and superficial. While the first book has a rich, multilayered approach to Greek mythology, this book has … a couple more Greek gods, and a tangential connection to Egypt, and that’s about it. There’s nothing here beneath the surface, and that’s disappointing.

Moreover, the little mythology carried over from the first book feels incredibly arbitrary now. The rules, such as they are, feel designed to facilitate the plot. Any narrative consistency around the nature of the Mirror Realm, the gods, Philautia’s dagger, etc., feels sacrificed in favour of the rule of cool—or at least the rule of convenience. While I love books that attempt to be creative with mythology and even play fast and loose with it—as the first book did, to its benefit—I need the worldbuilding to feel solid and, if not predictable per se, then logical. I need foreshadowing, not deus ex machinae. I need to feel like, when I get to the end of the book, everything was already there, just turned ninety degrees so I couldn’t see it until now. Not so with The Lost Portal, where it almost feels like Borja was making it up as she goes along, a DM barely ahead of the players.

Lastly, let’s talk about Hadley and the subplot with her brother. I really wanted to be onboard for the themes of reconciliation here. However, that shallow characterization strikes again: Caleb feels more like a caricature of a criminal element sibling than an actual, you know, person with complex feelings and motives. His dialogue feels cringey and cliché, and his behaviour is entirely motivated by plot. What should be one of this book’s most powerful features fizzles instead.

The Lost Portal tries to be intense and epic and thrilling but is really only a pale imitation, an echo of the elements someone thinks makes a book intense and epic and thrilling. This book is, unfortunately, an exercise in how intention and imagination alone cannot make for good storytelling.