The Ten Thousand Doors of January

In between my Harry Potter re-read and upcoming re-read of Stormlight Archive I wanted to take a bit of a detour. I have had a few books get added to my To Read list that were recommended on r/fantasy or made an impression and received accolades, which is how The Ten Thousand Doors of January ended up on my Kindle.

Books are Doors and I wanted out.

From the start the premise of the book captivated me. This was a character looking for escapism in books and had a curiosity about the world. This was just the amount of urban fantasy I wanted and was eager to see where the story went. The attention to stylings of characters and importance of Capital Words were some quirky elements that stood out for me. There was the right amount of mystery to keep me going and I quickly jumped in to January's story.

Monsters only come for bad children, for loose women, for impious men. The truth is that the powerful come for the weak, whenever and wherever they like. Always have, always will.

I came to the book for something different and I got exactly that. This wasn't my ideal book but I was impressed with mature themes like isolation, segregation and racism being tossed in. This book was hitting on some important struggles without making it a focal point of the story.

Unfortunately I started to lose steam on the story and I think it was when I started to enjoy Julian and Ade's story more than January's. I enjoyed the intentional confusion over who the author was of this story-within-a-story but as the pieces started to click I wanted more of that tale than what was happening in present time.

And yet the similarities of what January wrote Samuel and why aren't lost on me. Perhaps Ade's story was more interesting because there was a bit more exploration and adventure to find Julian, whereas January was fleeing and running and not exploring what lay beyond Doors.

Freedom isn't worth a single solitary shit if it isn't shared.

The book was a fun read but I feel I could have enjoyed it more if it was simply Ade and Julian's story or was January following her Mother's steps and hunting doors without the threat of the Archeological Society.

In the end, this was enjoyable book to step through and worthy of the accolades it received at the Goodreads Choice Awards.

Dear me. I boarded the hype train and never reached the promised destination.

[b:The Ten Thousand Doors of January|43521657|The Ten Thousand Doors of January|Alix E. Harrow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1548174710l/43521657.SY75.jpg|63516505] is a book I had been waiting to read for the longest time, since I saw it one of those 'to-read' lists. I'd like to preface this by saying I really wanted to like the book. Truly. Fantasy fiction is my favourite genre of all time, and I have allowed this partiality to perhaps cloud my judgement of a lot of books that concern themselves with it. Perhaps this is why I managed to get through so many pages before the dawning realisation that this book was, um, not great.

This is not a fantasy fiction book as much as it is a book concerned with political posturing and sermonising. There are other ways in which concepts of colonialism, race, gender biases and white supremacy could have been conveyed without detracting from the fantasy element, but they dominate the narrative in a rather crowded, ungainly fashion. The prose is beautiful, but not enough to hide the fact that the plot is rather simplistic, the story unidirectional, and that various parts of the story seem to have been tailored too smoothly, almost as if to make sure that everything proceeds slickly (towards a rather predictable ending).

I found it hard to connect with any of the characters, which in turn made it difficult for me to be sympathetic to their plight, and therefore rendered me a mere spectator as the story panned out.

Perhaps you might overlook these details in favour of the overall message of the book, that of the door as a conduit for change, but I could not, much as I wanted to.