A review by lingfish7
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

adventurous mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

2.5

⭐️⭐️💫2.5 
3 stars, rounded up Goodreads

🚪”Perhaps one cannot walk through a door and back out again without changing the world.”

📖🎧I feel so conflicted about this book. It has excellent writing, an interesting premise, and two interweaving stories (a story within a story). I loved the idea of reading about a book with doors that lead to entirely new realms. And Sci-fi fantasy/magical realism has been a new genre for me to explore lately. But this book lacked that special touch that makes you connect deeply to the story and characters.

Pros:
  • The book is highly quotable and I found myself in love with the wispy ways she crafted sentences in the narration. 
  • I loved the story within a story. The main character, January, stumbles upon a book that describes a love story between Yule and Adelaide, two lovers who met at the entrance to a door to each other’s worlds. This story was captivating, but it was the secondary story and not the main one. I don’t think the author intended for this story to come across as more interesting but it did. This made the rest of the story feel slower.

Cons:
  • I didn’t love the main character, January. She lacked depth and was fairly one dimensional and stagnant. I liked her movement from a people pleaser to a rebel but that didn’t feel like real growth, only the author’s attempt at character development. It fell flat, emotionally.
  • The author’s description of January being an “in between girl” bordered on racist. Her skin was described as reddish and that didn’t sit right with me given the American indigenous population. I also felt like the author’s attempts to make it seem like January was a subject of racism (the book being set in the early 1900’s) felt off and possibly historically inaccurate. It didn’t feel very real.
  • I had to both read the hardcopy and listen to the audiobook in order to finish it because of the many lulls in the story.
  • By the end of the book I wasn’t invested enough in any character to desire a happy ending. I predicted it would end happy in a fairly stereotypical way and it did. There was no anticipation or relief once it arrived. 🤷🏻‍♀️

This book was written so well, lyrically, but without the captivating cast of characters and plot to keep it going it just fell flat for me. I know others really enjoyed this, but I couldn’t connect or get into it.

⚠️Triggers: animal abuse | self-harm | asylum scene | racism | white saviorism 

“If we address stories as archeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

“It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.”

“Do I regret it? Would I take it back, if I could? Tell her to resign herself to home and hearth, to give up her wandering ways? It depends which weighs more: a life, or a soul.”

“It would take a brave man to love a witch. And most men are cowards.”
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