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craftysnailtail'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? It's complicated
4.75
I can't get enough of Harrow's style of writing. Her metaphors and descriptions are like nothing I've encountered in writing before. Everything feels lyrical and alive. It's honestly difficult to move on after reading one of her books because it's like I have a book hangover, but in the worst way. I love the story and the characters, but what I can't move on from is Harrow herself. Her style almost ruins reading anything else after finishing a novel of hers.
Overall, I highly recommend this book just for Harrow's style alone, but it's also a fascinating plot with creative and well developed characters. Yes, it starts off rather slow, but that's extremely intentional. Yes, January feels frustratingly naive, but of course she is given her living situation. This book is all about adventure, imagination, and developing your own life's narrative. One of the top books I read all year and I recommend it to everyone!
Overall, I highly recommend this book just for Harrow's style alone, but it's also a fascinating plot with creative and well developed characters. Yes, it starts off rather slow, but that's extremely intentional. Yes, January feels frustratingly naive, but of course she is given her living situation. This book is all about adventure, imagination, and developing your own life's narrative. One of the top books I read all year and I recommend it to everyone!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Racism, Self harm, Forced institutionalization, Grief, and Gaslighting
Moderate: Child abuse, Confinement, Cursing, Racial slurs, Sexism, Slavery, Blood, Death of parent, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Animal cruelty, Death, Abandonment, and Alcohol
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: Animal cruelty, Gun violence, Forced institutionalization, Grief, and Abandonment
Moderate: Animal death, Death, Racism, Self harm, Torture, Violence, Death of parent, Murder, and Colonisation
Minor: Cursing, Misogyny, Sexual assault, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, and Alcohol
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: Confinement, Death, Racism, Violence, Gaslighting, and Abandonment
Moderate: Animal cruelty and Gun violence
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: Animal cruelty, Death, Racism, Forced institutionalization, Abandonment, and Injury/Injury detail
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: Animal cruelty, Toxic relationship, Forced institutionalization, and Blood
Moderate: Death, Racism, Xenophobia, and Classism
Minor: Colonisation
spineofthesaurus's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Self harm, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Blood, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Abandonment, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism
Moderate: Ableism, Animal cruelty, Child abuse, Death, Drug use, Gun violence, Torture, Murder, Pregnancy, Fire/Fire injury, Alcohol, and Sexual harassment
Minor: Slavery, Stalking, Abortion, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis
321zeggy's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Gun violence, Forced institutionalization, and Blood
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Death, Racism, Violence, Blood, Grief, Abandonment, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism
Minor: Pregnancy and Sexual harassment
twistykris's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
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? It's complicated
4.5
An absolutely enchanting, magical book about portals into other worlds and the blatant racism, sexism, and classism of early 1900s America, all wrapped into two love stories. I loved so many of the characters in this and especially admired January's voice as a mixed-race young woman growing up in a rich household without her parents.
I switched back and forth between a physical copy and the audiobook and the story-within-a-story was fantastic, if a little confusing in the audiobook (at first it was hard to tell when the inner story was starting and ending).
I switched back and forth between a physical copy and the audiobook and the story-within-a-story was fantastic, if a little confusing in the audiobook (at first it was hard to tell when the inner story was starting and ending).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Self harm, and Forced institutionalization
Moderate: Death, Gun violence, Racism, Blood, and Grief
tangleroot_eli's review against another edition
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: Animal cruelty, Child abuse, Confinement, Death, Racism, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Cultural appropriation, Abandonment, Colonisation, and Classism
Moderate: Gun violence, Racial slurs, and Pregnancy
Minor: Police brutality and War
hecubatohim's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
medium-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? Yes
4.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Death, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Blood, Grief, Murder, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism