shadowspinner's review against another edition
adventurous
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
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty and Blood
Moderate: Abandonment and Racism
kat_smith24's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-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
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Blood, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Colonisation, Gun violence, Confinement, Domestic abuse, Abandonment, Death of parent, and Self harm
skbat's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
inspiring
mysterious
tense
fast-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
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Forced institutionalization, Animal cruelty, Grief, Gun violence, and Abandonment
Moderate: Torture, Murder, Death, Death of parent, Violence, Self harm, Animal death, Colonisation, and Racism
Minor: Sexual assault, Cursing, Fire/Fire injury, Misogyny, Pregnancy, and Alcohol
joannabren's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
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
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Forced institutionalization, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Child abuse, Emotional abuse, and Confinement
milenaaax98's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
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
5.0
I have never annotated and underlined so many things in a fiction book. This book is written so beautifully, some sentences make your heart ache. We should all try to be like January
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Death, Violence, Gaslighting, Confinement, and Abandonment
Moderate: Gun violence and Animal cruelty
keinbock's review against another edition
4.75
Beautiful prose and concept; it reminded me so much of Morgenstern's Starless Sea, but I much prefer what harrow did with the concept. It's much more hopeful and empowering. However, I have to dock it for hurting the dog and letting us believe he died in pain for far too many pages.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty
tiffanielle's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
3.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism, Injury/Injury detail, Abandonment, Animal cruelty, Death, and Forced institutionalization
lingfish7's review against another edition
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.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Self harm, and Racism
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
3.25
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.
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 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.
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.
Spoiler
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
Spoiler
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.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.
Spoiler
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Forced institutionalization, Animal cruelty, Blood, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Xenophobia, Classism, Death, and Racism
Minor: Colonisation
rubybastille's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Is it weird that I felt like this was too satisfying? Maybe it’s just my current mental state but the escapism felt off-the-charts in a way that just made me grumpy about my own life. But I liked its very unique setting and characters.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment and Animal cruelty
Moderate: Misogyny and Racism