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cherry_lake's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Really enjoyed this book. Slow paced movement from historical fiction into fantasy. Felt like an homage to older YA novels and also did I detect direct inspiration from Broken Earth Trilogy? Definitely difficult themes!
Seems like those who didn’t enjoy it were mainly disappointed by false advertising or assumptions, but I had no idea what it was about or that it existed until a friend recommended! Glad I tried it.
Seems like those who didn’t enjoy it were mainly disappointed by false advertising or assumptions, but I had no idea what it was about or that it existed until a friend recommended! Glad I tried it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Xenophobia, Forced institutionalization, Abandonment, Torture, Self harm, Racism, and Violence
svenja135's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Forced institutionalization, Animal cruelty, and Violence
Moderate: Racism, Emotional abuse, Grief, and Xenophobia
merbears's review against another edition
adventurous
inspiring
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Injury/Injury detail, Abandonment, Self harm, Racism, and Forced institutionalization
Moderate: Death of parent, Colonisation, Classism, Xenophobia, Blood, Confinement, Gaslighting, Animal cruelty, Cultural appropriation, and Death
Minor: Misogyny, Pregnancy, Sexism, and Murder
mindsplinters's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Glorious language in a world inspired by all of those portal fantasies that served as a staple to so many of our childhoods. When we are little, we know that words have power. When we get older... we forget. This book makes you remember in the most visceral way as you follow the inner and outer and round-about journey of January Scaller and her mother and her father and her associates. The entire thing is caught midway between a fairy tale and a very real world story of wealth and haves and have-nots. While there is a lot of magic here, not just in the words used by the author or the stuff drawn from the characters' will, there is also a lot of brutal honesty. Even in the other worlds mentioned, there is no shying away from the harsh brutality that might be there. Doubly so with what we readers might reasonably call our own. At the turn of the century (1900, that is), there was a lot going on in the world and not all of it was good. Progress came in two flavors, good and bad, but not everyone can tell them apart. Racism, stratification of society, people actively fighting to stay on top of the heap.
January is witness to it all but only slowly starts to actually understand and realize what it all means. As a character, she has a very long way to grow and go and it is both pleasure and pain to be her companion. Without quite coming out and saying it, the author holds us witness to the emotional abuse and neglect, the masked concern, and care with strings that January endures. We see the flaws; January has to learn to see the poison behind and beneath it all. Understandably, as a complex and very human character, she fights the knowledge at times or backslides. After all, it is sometimes much easier to ignore a door or close it than to deal with what might come through it.
In the end, though, this book is so full of hope and strength and you leave it battered and scarred but with a new determination. As January says (via Alix E Harrow) "I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return."
May we all have the bravery and conviction to STOP being polite when confronted with Wrongness and Evil.
January is witness to it all but only slowly starts to actually understand and realize what it all means. As a character, she has a very long way to grow and go and it is both pleasure and pain to be her companion. Without quite coming out and saying it, the author holds us witness to the emotional abuse and neglect, the masked concern, and care with strings that January endures. We see the flaws; January has to learn to see the poison behind and beneath it all. Understandably, as a complex and very human character, she fights the knowledge at times or backslides. After all, it is sometimes much easier to ignore a door or close it than to deal with what might come through it.
In the end, though, this book is so full of hope and strength and you leave it battered and scarred but with a new determination. As January says (via Alix E Harrow) "I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return."
May we all have the bravery and conviction to STOP being polite when confronted with Wrongness and Evil.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Self harm, Violence, and Animal cruelty
Moderate: Xenophobia and Racism
heshanks's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty and Racism
Moderate: Sexism, Abandonment, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Colonisation, Xenophobia, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail
fatedefied's review
adventurous
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Self harm
Moderate: Xenophobia, Racism, Racial slurs, Blood, Injury/Injury detail, and Abandonment
valorree's review
adventurous
dark
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Vague spoilers ahead, not enough to warrant spoiler tags (*I* think, but maybe you think they would so heres a warning) on the themes in this book
The first couple chapters from January's POV were kinda hard to get through, not because the writing was bad but bc of the colonialism, racism, and imperialism that January herself subscribes to at times. Of course that's important for character development and it's an accurate portrayal of the times but it still was rough at times
(Below are some spoilers on plot points so I do use the tags)
I think if I was younger I would have liked this less, back then I was used to large story arcs with one big bad or evil entity with a final showdown which this book doesn't have. Instead the ending is a relatively small one, where there are small and mid-level bosses January overcomes. The final boss being her pseudo-father and caretaker and i think i can appreciate that a lot more because of how it is a really great representation of these rich white men thinking they're at the top of the food chain and being an authority over things when really nature the doors opening and closing doesn't really notice and will always balance out. Locke and his group trying to put rules to how magic works goes about as well as California trying to build a sea in the desert
The first couple chapters from January's POV were kinda hard to get through, not because the writing was bad but bc of the colonialism, racism, and imperialism that January herself subscribes to at times. Of course that's important for character development and it's an accurate portrayal of the times but it still was rough at times
(Below are some spoilers on plot points so I do use the tags)
I think if I was younger I would have liked this less, back then I was used to
Content Warnings
Graphic: Forced institutionalization
Moderate: Toxic relationship, Racial slurs, Colonisation, Forced institutionalization, and Xenophobia
sinceraly's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
I really, really wanted to like this book. But I think the weight of its own potential was something that weighed it down in the long run.
The good:
The gimmick of portal dimensions. I will always love this gimmick. Portals are so often underutilized as an avenue of story progression, and I particularly loved the way Ten Thousand Doors does it, where every portal is quite literally a Door to another world, reflecting the environment its found in. I love the fact that the portals exist there, and that them being there is less of a "oh god the worlds are imploding on each other," and more of a "the Doors are just that, doors that exist in order to lead people to new places." The Doors aren't there to add stakes inherently, which is so often the case with media focusing on inter-dimensional portals, but them being there adds stakes because how can you trust people will have good intentions with them?
The B-plot(?) I say that with uncertainty because I really don't think I should label it as such, but can't find another way to describe it. See, in Ten Thousand Doors, there is an in-universe book, also named The Ten Thousand Doors. In that in-universe book, we hear the story of Ade and Yule Ian, two people desperately searching for each other through portals and adventure. That story, I think, really taps into the potential of the portal existence in universe, while the actual book itself plays it too safe for my own tastes. The actual book itself is mostly set on Earth in the early 1900s USAmerican south, while the in-universe Ten Thousand Doors describes fantastical worlds and settings accessible through various portals on Earth. It also plays an important part in the narrative in the actual Ten Thousand Doors novel and serves as a way to sew together the loose threads that would otherwise be left there. The chapters that served as a retelling of this fictional book were my favorite to read by far.
Ade, Yule Ian, and Jane are wonderful characters. They're not perfect characters, especially not Yule Ian, who is incredibly flawed as an expression of grief he cannot cope with, but they're very multi-dimensional and interesting. They've each had their own share of struggles and wandering, but those experiences made them into well-rounded, intriguing characters that I loved learning about. I only wish we saw more of them, but for plot reasons, they all had to exit the story too fast for my liking for some reason or another. Seeing their attachments to January play out was especially fun and I just wish we could have seen more of their relationships with her.
The commentary is well done. January is a mixed Black girl growing up under the care of a white, rich male benefactor while her father is out exploring far out places. She has a lot of moments where she comments on not fitting into the society she lives in, on how people don't respect her, as either a Black person, or a woman, on how things are harder for her just because she is both of those things. I never felt at any point that the book was shoving it down my throat or being unrelentingly preachy, instead hiding a lot of its criticisms in the roles of its villains, of how people behave within and outside of the constructs set by USAmerican society. I do want to note, however, that Alix E. Harrow is a white author, and as far as I could find, no sensitivity reader was hired for this novel. I am a white hispanic, so mileage may vary on how effective these criticisms seem.
The not so great:
I don't hate the bad guys. I just wish they were better explained. This part is mostly going under a spoiler tag because much of it doesn't get explained until the last possible minute. In The Ten Thousand Doors, the villains are quite literally expats from other portal worlds that found ways to use otherworldly powers as ways to cement themselves as incredibly powerful and incredibly wealthy figures in Earth society. Mr. Locke, January's guardian from childhood onwards, is some sort of charm-speaking demon from a Hell dimension, and in his backstory, you learn he was quite literally the king of Hell. Following that, you learn that he had somehow unlocked that charmspeaking power and used that (and his light complexion and charisma) to unlock a ton of weight in human society. You learn that the rest of the members of his "historical society" are also otherworldly beings who want to close down every portal in order to stop others (read: monsters like themselves) from coming to Earth and "ruining the order of balance," unlike themselves, who did not at all force themselves into society's highest positions in order to make their own agendas come true. You learn that the literal energy-sucking vampire that January was an unfortunate victim of earlier in the book had much the same backstory, and it all feels so ridiculous.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a book that has given itself ample power to make fantastical, nonsensical things like this exist, but the book itself has such a weird feeling of realism it's constantly weighed down by. I believe it's because we hear of these worlds - the Hell dimension, the freezing, frigid world filled with bloodthirsty creatures, the jungle-haven protected by huntresses that can shift into leopards - but we don't actually get to be in them. January only enters two Doors that lead to separate worlds, and both of them are more realistic than I'd like for a book that wants to push such an unbelievable villain angle. Even the magical islands that her father was born and raised in is more of a magically realistic society, with the main form of magic described just being a form of word based magic with the power to nudge things into happening rather than a fantastical form of magic that would force me to suspend my disbelief. I adore magical realism, don't get me wrong, but when you have such a realistic view on magic, and then at the end hit me with "btw these old rich white guys are actually literal demons with the powers of vampirism and charmspeak and that's why everything sucks," it feels unfulfilling. I would have preferred if it was more along the lines of, "yeah, they're demons, but its because of their inherent knowledge of human nature and vices and how people respond to negative aspects of society that they were able to bring themselves to power on Earth." Harrow had brought her own critiques of white society down by just likening them to demons so shallowly. Doesn't it make them even more truly evil if they were legitimately just bad, privileged people who wanted to gatekeep the secrets of their own success because they just wanted to?
What really disappointed me:
January herself. I wish I could say I loved her, but truly, I thought she was the weakest part of the books at some point. There were times where I wanted to grip her shoulders and shake her into seeing sense, into not doing stupid things like not killing the guy who murdered Sal when she had the chance, twice, even though she knew he could become a problem later, which he did. She was so stubbornly attached to Mr. Locke even though she knew he didn't have her better interest in mind, even after he threw her into a mental asylum fully well knowing she wasn't insane. Even though he said her father was dead and refused to give her time to mourn him. Even after learning that his associates wanted to kill her. I could understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt for maybe the first third of the book, but at some point it just got frustrating to read through. I also hated how Jane got the short end of the stick when it came to January - talk about an unfulfilling ending. After what Jane did for January, January should have come back and done everything in her power to send her back home.
The "romance" was so half-assed it was insulting. In all fairness, the romance is barely there and very ignorable for the most part, and I could see myself hating it less if the "slow burn" was believable and the ending didn't have January prioritize the love interest over the woman that literally helped raise her and also saved her life multiple times. January's realization of love barely felt believable with how much of the love interest we actually saw and it just felt like a very bad rendition of "well, a man and a woman obviously can't be just best friends, so we're going to make it be romantic to cover that base." It was hard enough to jump onboard the Ade and Yule Ian ship with their insta-love, but at least the actions they took afterwards helped me along. The second time around I was just wishing the romance had been left out entirely - it added nothing to the experience.
The ending. Everything leading up to it felt pretty pointless once I closed the e-book for the last time. All that work, all that time, all the blood, tears, literal death had just trying to reunite with her father, let alone both parents, and January just decides fuck it. Let's go adventure the other portals now. Bye mom I've known for three days after wanting to meet you for years, bye neglectful dad I've always yearned for a relationship with! I'm gonna go adventure with my insta boyfriend. I hate it here!
It doesn't even discuss what she does with the rest of the historical society that is no doubt still wandering around trying to close Doors. It doesn't even discuss if she helps Jane, the real MVP of this whole shenanigan. I truly hate it here.
At the end of the day, Harrow is a wonderful writer with a real talent for writing beautiful prose. But when making a world with the possibilities of infinity, she doesn't have the imagination to really make it count, or make it feel full of endless possibility. Her down-to-earth prose does not help her land the weightlessness that a true fantasy makes you feel, and even when she tried, my experiences with the book made it hard to suspend my disbelief. It felt wholeheartedly like a book that would be near perfect technically, but that just could not nail the more emotional, illogical parts of sci-fi or fantasy as hard as it tried.
The good:
The gimmick of portal dimensions. I will always love this gimmick. Portals are so often underutilized as an avenue of story progression, and I particularly loved the way Ten Thousand Doors does it, where every portal is quite literally a Door to another world, reflecting the environment its found in. I love the fact that the portals exist there, and that them being there is less of a "oh god the worlds are imploding on each other," and more of a "the Doors are just that, doors that exist in order to lead people to new places." The Doors aren't there to add stakes inherently, which is so often the case with media focusing on inter-dimensional portals, but them being there adds stakes because how can you trust people will have good intentions with them?
The B-plot(?) I say that with uncertainty because I really don't think I should label it as such, but can't find another way to describe it. See, in Ten Thousand Doors, there is an in-universe book, also named The Ten Thousand Doors. In that in-universe book, we hear the story of Ade and Yule Ian, two people desperately searching for each other through portals and adventure. That story, I think, really taps into the potential of the portal existence in universe, while the actual book itself plays it too safe for my own tastes. The actual book itself is mostly set on Earth in the early 1900s USAmerican south, while the in-universe Ten Thousand Doors describes fantastical worlds and settings accessible through various portals on Earth. It also plays an important part in the narrative in the actual Ten Thousand Doors novel and serves as a way to sew together the loose threads that would otherwise be left there. The chapters that served as a retelling of this fictional book were my favorite to read by far.
Ade, Yule Ian, and Jane are wonderful characters. They're not perfect characters, especially not Yule Ian, who is incredibly flawed as an expression of grief he cannot cope with, but they're very multi-dimensional and interesting. They've each had their own share of struggles and wandering, but those experiences made them into well-rounded, intriguing characters that I loved learning about. I only wish we saw more of them, but for plot reasons, they all had to exit the story too fast for my liking for some reason or another. Seeing their attachments to January play out was especially fun and I just wish we could have seen more of their relationships with her.
The commentary is well done. January is a mixed Black girl growing up under the care of a white, rich male benefactor while her father is out exploring far out places. She has a lot of moments where she comments on not fitting into the society she lives in, on how people don't respect her, as either a Black person, or a woman, on how things are harder for her just because she is both of those things. I never felt at any point that the book was shoving it down my throat or being unrelentingly preachy, instead hiding a lot of its criticisms in the roles of its villains, of how people behave within and outside of the constructs set by USAmerican society. I do want to note, however, that Alix E. Harrow is a white author, and as far as I could find, no sensitivity reader was hired for this novel. I am a white hispanic, so mileage may vary on how effective these criticisms seem.
The not so great:
I don't hate the bad guys. I just wish they were better explained. This part is mostly going under a spoiler tag because much of it doesn't get explained until the last possible minute.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a book that has given itself ample power to make fantastical, nonsensical things like this exist, but the book itself has such a weird feeling of realism it's constantly weighed down by. I believe it's because we hear of these worlds - the Hell dimension, the freezing, frigid world filled with bloodthirsty creatures, the jungle-haven protected by huntresses that can shift into leopards - but we don't actually get to be in them. January only enters two Doors that lead to separate worlds, and both of them are more realistic than I'd like for a book that wants to push such an unbelievable villain angle. Even the magical islands that her father was born and raised in is more of a magically realistic society, with the main form of magic described just being a form of word based magic with the power to nudge things into happening rather than a fantastical form of magic that would force me to suspend my disbelief. I adore magical realism, don't get me wrong, but when you have such a realistic view on magic, and then at the end hit me with "btw these old rich white guys are actually literal demons with the powers of vampirism and charmspeak and that's why everything sucks," it feels unfulfilling. I would have preferred if it was more along the lines of, "yeah, they're demons, but its because of their inherent knowledge of human nature and vices and how people respond to negative aspects of society that they were able to bring themselves to power on Earth." Harrow had brought her own critiques of white society down by just likening them to demons so shallowly. Doesn't it make them even more truly evil if they were legitimately just bad, privileged people who wanted to gatekeep the secrets of their own success because they just wanted to?
What really disappointed me:
January herself. I wish I could say I loved her, but truly, I thought she was the weakest part of the books at some point. There were times where I wanted to grip her shoulders and shake her into seeing sense, into not doing stupid things like
The "romance" was so half-assed it was insulting. In all fairness, the romance is barely there and very ignorable for the most part, and I could see myself hating it less if the "slow burn" was believable and the ending didn't have January prioritize the love interest over the woman that literally helped raise her and also saved her life multiple times. January's realization of love barely felt believable with how much of the love interest we actually saw and it just felt like a very bad rendition of "well, a man and a woman obviously can't be just best friends, so we're going to make it be romantic to cover that base." It was hard enough to jump onboard the Ade and Yule Ian ship with their insta-love, but at least the actions they took afterwards helped me along. The second time around I was just wishing the romance had been left out entirely - it added nothing to the experience.
The ending. Everything leading up to it felt pretty pointless once I closed the e-book for the last time.
It doesn't even discuss what she does with the rest of the historical society that is no doubt still wandering around trying to close Doors. It doesn't even discuss if she helps Jane, the real MVP of this whole shenanigan. I truly hate it here.
At the end of the day, Harrow is a wonderful writer with a real talent for writing beautiful prose. But when making a world with the possibilities of infinity, she doesn't have the imagination to really make it count, or make it feel full of endless possibility. Her down-to-earth prose does not help her land the weightlessness that a true fantasy makes you feel, and even when she tried, my experiences with the book made it hard to suspend my disbelief. It felt wholeheartedly like a book that would be near perfect technically, but that just could not nail the more emotional, illogical parts of sci-fi or fantasy as hard as it tried.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Forced institutionalization, Blood, Toxic relationship, and Animal cruelty
Moderate: Xenophobia, Racism, Death, and Classism
Minor: Colonisation
spineofthesaurus's review
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Blood, Body horror, Classism, Colonisation, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Gaslighting, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Self harm, Xenophobia, and Cultural appropriation
Moderate: Alcohol, Death, Drug use, Murder, Pregnancy, Torture, Ableism, Gun violence, Sexual harassment, Animal cruelty, Child abuse, and Fire/Fire injury
Minor: Slavery, Abortion, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Stalking
tangleroot_eli's review
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Big mixed feels about this one. I like so many things about it: January herself; Ade and Yule Ian's story - actually, I found all of the characters fairly well written.
But I struggled with the pacing, especially in the first 2/3. While January is an interesting character, her story kept me less engrossed than Ade and Yule Ian's, even though she's ostensibly the main character. For me, the story really starts in the last third, when everyone's threads come together.
Ultimately, my biggest disappointment with the book is the the conventionality of Harrow's other worlds. They're "completely different from our own," but in very limited ways. Where were the worlds with people but without capitalism? Where were the worlds where people weren't "somewhere in between [men and women]" but just people? The refuges in Arcadia clearly include same-sex couples; were none of them looking for a world where that was the norm, or did the idea of such a world not occur to Harrow? It often seems like, in Harrow's mind, the best a queer and/or BIPOC character can hope for is a world where their identity is ignored or, at best, tolerated, rather than one where it's celebrated.
In 2001, astronauts carry paper notebooks because Arthur C Clarke, however vast his imagination, couldn't conceive of computers so small they fit in the palm of our hands. In The Ten Thousand Doors of January, all worlds, no matter how superficially different from our own, at core are quite similar, because Alix E Harrow, however vast her imagination, couldn't conceive of what real, fundamental difference looks like.
But I struggled with the pacing, especially in the first 2/3. While January is an interesting character, her story kept me less engrossed than Ade and Yule Ian's, even though she's ostensibly the main character. For me, the story really starts in the last third, when everyone's threads come together.
Ultimately, my biggest disappointment with the book is the the conventionality of Harrow's other worlds. They're "completely different from our own," but in very limited ways. Where were the worlds with people but without capitalism? Where were the worlds where people weren't "somewhere in between [men and women]" but just people? The refuges in Arcadia clearly include same-sex couples; were none of them looking for a world where that was the norm, or did the idea of such a world not occur to Harrow? It often seems like, in Harrow's mind, the best a queer and/or BIPOC character can hope for is a world where their identity is ignored or, at best, tolerated, rather than one where it's celebrated.
In 2001, astronauts carry paper notebooks because Arthur C Clarke, however vast his imagination, couldn't conceive of computers so small they fit in the palm of our hands. In The Ten Thousand Doors of January, all worlds, no matter how superficially different from our own, at core are quite similar, because Alix E Harrow, however vast her imagination, couldn't conceive of what real, fundamental difference looks like.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Animal cruelty, Colonisation, Racism, Confinement, Cultural appropriation, Death, Death of parent, Medical trauma, Grief, Forced institutionalization, Child abuse, Classism, Medical content, and Xenophobia
Moderate: Pregnancy, Gun violence, and Racial slurs
Minor: Police brutality and War