Preview of The Door in the Wall Summary:

The Door in the Wall provides an excellent introduction to medieval England.

Angeli's portrayal of life in the fourteenth-century—the very time when Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was a boy—is quite authentic. Angeli presents a realistic picture of the larger crosscurrents of life in medieval England, and she succeeds in creating a believable context for her story through the insertion of carefully selected details. The novel takes in the sights, sounds, and smells of a bustling medieval city and contrasts them with the calm serenity of a monastic community; it describes the nature of travel on the highways and byways of medieval England and the ever-present dangers there for the unwary traveler; and it depicts the excitements and inconveniences of living in a medieval castle under constant threat of attack.

More important than the novel's depiction of the English Middle Ages, however...