“A gorgeous, aching love letter to stories, storytellers and the doors they lead us through…absolutely enchanting.”–Christina Henry, bestselling author of Alice and Lost BoysLOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER!Finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy AwardsIn the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this … fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut.
In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.
Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.
Lush and richly imagined, a tale of impossible journeys, unforgettable love, and the enduring power of stories awaits in Alix E. Harrow’s spellbinding debut–step inside and discover its magic.
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This book was excellent. Great debut. January Scaller grows up in the home of Mr. Locke while her father travels the world searching for treasures for Mr. Locke’s collections. Mr. Locke has taken her on his travels too. January has encountered doors but has been told to not to touch them. January finds a book that is left for her that tells a fantastic story. It is almost a love letter. To her or to someone else. It tells of the doors! Great fantasy story. I will not say more and give anything away. Read for yourself.
I’ve always been a sucker for portal fantasies, and this one is winner. From page one you know it was written by someone who loves words and knows how to use them.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
I’m not even sure where to start with this book — it’s so big and full of story.
I suppose we should start with January, so named by her mother for the god Janus, who looks both forward and backward.
“You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark.”
When the story opens, she seems like a normal little girl, though out of place in this time period and circumstance.
“I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.”
January lives in a manor house with a rich man for a guardian while her father searches the world for artifacts for him. It’s a bit sad, but there is so much more to the story, and as it unfolds, we are taking on a very rich and full journey.
“When I was seven, I found a Door . . . 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.”
There may not be ten thousand doors in this story, but there are a great many. There are also a great many misperceptions and the author is masterful in painting rich pictures that do not give us more information than we need to know at that point in the plot. The writing is beautiful in the pictures it presents and the words chosen.
January has a governess, Miss Wilda who is a bit stodgy, and a friend from the local grocer’s, Samuel Zappia, though she isn’t supposed to spend time associating with him. He still manages to slip her stories to read. He also presents her with her best friend, a puppy she names Sinbad. This dog is just a dog in this novel, but also all of the best things a dog can be, a best friend and protector.
January finds a book in a chest, which she presumes was left there for her by her guardian, which sets her on a journey as it tells the story of Miss Adelaide Lee Larson and her explorations through Doors.
“I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.”
As I said, there are many Doors in this story, and just as you think you have a handle on what is happening, you step through a new one into something that builds a new story onto the one you are reading.
“…there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories.”
A fantastical journey I hope you will take.
I gave this book two stars.
I was extremely disappointed with this book. To be frank, if this wasn’t a buddy read I probably would’ve just DNF’d to save me some time.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is about a girl named January. Set in the early 1900’s, she enjoys a lavish lifestyle thanks to her and her father’s benefactor Mr. Locke. She lives in his strange museum of oddities. But when her father goes missing she goes on a quest to find him, finding much more than she bargained for in the process.
Alright, so I’m gonna get this out of the way. If you are expecting this book to be about January finding hidden doors and going on an adventure to other worlds, do not be fooled. Very little of that actually happens in the book, and if I’d known that I wouldn’t have bothered reading it. I honestly think this book was a huge tease. The concept of the doors is ever present, the element of fantasy just a doorknob away. But at least 90% of the book doesn’t go there, which made me really upset. Why would the writing tease me at every turn and corner only for the reader to be consistently disappointed? If you make a huge deal about the doors and the worlds behind them then I fully expect the author to take me there. Instead what we get is a blathering mess.
January was a frustrating character. For starters, most of the book was a constant self-pity party for her. Believe me, her life wasn’t perfect, and she had plenty to be upset about. But rather than take that pent up anger and having some courage to change her life, she is for the most part meek. There’s only so much of that a reader can take without getting annoyed. I do think the author tried to have her character progress, but she still wasn’t brave enough and constantly whined about her past every single chapter. Again, I get it, but the character should’ve stopped being so darned introspective and looked around for answers more quickly.
Most other characters weren’t really all that great either, especially her father. There is a point where he ‘explains’ his actions, but it makes no sense whatsoever and just shows how terrible of a character he is. He’s just as meek as January is.
The flow of this book was terrible. I would say at least 50% of this book is purple prose, and as much as I enjoy a well thought out simile or metaphor, it is simply too much and is unacceptable. Events that should take maybe a page to get the point across can take upwards of ten pages of introspective blather from January. I got to a point where I just started skimming. If I saw the purple prose starting I skipped over it until something actually happened. Yes, the writing is very pretty, but every scene drags horribly and takes the reader out of the story. There must be balance in writing, and this book severely lacks it.
Plotwise not much really happens due to the book being mainly fluff from January’s introverted obsessions with her flowery thoughts. What does occur is disappointing. Like I said earlier, I expected an adventure to other worlds. We hardly got any of that. There are two POV’s, one from a special book that details otherworldly travels. As good as that sounds, the way it’s presented doesn’t really add to the story and there still isn’t enough fantasy there. It felt like more of a distraction from January’s boring journey, and I wasn’t buying it.
Overall, this book severely lacked the fantasy that was promised, had way too much purple prose, and the characters were weak. I’m glad I rented it from my library instead of purchasing it, and I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone. If you’re looking for a true fantasy adventure, look elsewhere.
I loved this book for so many reasons. It’s a portal fantasy, which I love (obviously), but also the author does so much work to expose the harm caused by colonization while still telling a fantastic story. It has so much depth and so many layers. I did feel like it took the main character a long time to gain agency and DO THINGS but there are lots of in-story reasons for that.
“When I was seven, I found a door. I suspect I should capitalize that word, so you understand I’m not talking about your garden- or common-variety door that leads reliably to a white-tiled kitchen or a bedroom closet. When I was seven, I found a Door.”
And so begins The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a spellbinding story that blends history and fantasy. The world is populated by January Scaller, a young girl of dubious parentage, her caretaker Mr. Locke, who’s wealthy and quite ordered, and January’s father who travels the world to procure notable objects for Mr. Locke’s collection. What yo come to discover is that all of the characters possess unusual gifts, and a seemingly straightforward story is anything but.
Author Alix Harrow weaves reality with historic details, fantasy, and bits of magic that lure you like a love potion. From January’s story you jump to the pages of Yule Ian, a man from a distant land whose life is all about words and books and reading and things that are hidden. Doors. You cannot turn the pages fast enough and yet it would be a shame to rush through the book when there are so many details to savor. There is wordsmithing and wordmagic and tapestry and artistry. Delicious plot weaving and emotional trapeze walking. The characters are full of life and heart and painful wounds and with each page the obstacles grow heavier, more difficult, more compromising. And in the end . . . Well.
Readers, writers, and storytellers alike, this is a book to treasure. One you’ll tell all your friends about, your family, your children. The Ten Thousand Doors of January will stay with you for many moons to come. Unless, of course, you find a Door. And then, who knows?
[Way more than 5 stars]
This book is definitely entertaining! I enjoyed the characters and story. I recommend it!
The Ten Thousand Doors of January was a fantastic book in every possible way. After all of the recommendations, I am so happy to say that it fully lived up to my expectations (and they were very high expectations!). For those completely unfamiliar with the book, it is a historical fantasy reminiscent of old portal adventures (the most famous of which is probably still The Chronicles of Narnia). The Ten Thousand Doors of January both celebrates and subverts the genre, however, and this was what absolutely solidified it as a new favourite on my bookshelf.
The novel follows January Scaller, an inquisitive and adventurous young girl growing up in a deeply restrictive setting. January doesn’t fit into her early 1900’s environment in many ways. She’s far too blunt and outgoing for her gender–a fact which constantly vexes the adults around her. She’s also mixed-race, and the constant social razor’s edge between her skin colour and her guardian’s obvious wealth never failed to be palpable.
January’s strange social standing makes it possible for the reader to glimpse a little bit of each level of society during the period, and it also makes for truly tense, complex social interactions with the people who have taken it upon themselves to “civilize” January. The author does not take the easy way out of these interactions: January both loves and loathes her guardian, who showers her with expensive gifts but also treats her like a curious artifact from his collection. This, I feel, was the biggest strength of the book: one could easily allow January’s guardian to be a stand-in for the Empires of the era as a whole, and many of the parallels would quickly turn scathing. Without spoiling too much, there is a moment right at the end of the book where January finally realizes that she has been carefully trained to be polite in order to keep her biddable even in the face of awful things. I like to think that most women and minorities can relate to that moment especially, and I definitely felt a real catharsis when January finally threw off those last chains of politeness.
But for those searching for magic and wonder, The Ten Thousand Doors of January does not disappoint. I felt a definite nostalgia for some of my childhood books as it went on, describing all sorts of portals to other worlds. Curiously, January rarely enters these other worlds herself, but often finds herself reading detailed accounts of other world-travellers from a mysterious book–but the stories all eventually intertwine, such that a greater plot reveals itself. By the end of the book, January has finally fled her guardians in search of the truth and gone on an adventure of her own.
This book is not young adult, but I have shelved it there in addition to my other shelves because I feel that this book has deep appeal for both wider audiences and young adult readers in particular. If I were to be so bold, I think The Ten Thousand Doors of January is what young adults should be offered as reading material. The coming-of-age themes in this book are things that will deeply resonate with this coming generation in particular. January Scaller learns a lot of ugly truths about the wider world as she ages, and must grapple with hard dualities and betrayals from the adults whom she once trusted. At one point, she is told that she is crazy for believing that there is something wrong. At another point, she is told about an injustice that affects her personally: “This is simply the way the world works, and you should accept it.”
I have a feeling that the younger people in my life can deeply relate.
I will part with one last note, which breaks my usual habit of avoiding spoilers for one very good reason. If you are absolutely dead-set on avoiding spoilers, you may stop reading here.
Still with me? Excellent.
About halfway through the book, I had to put it down for about a week because The Dog Died. I know how irrational it is to be more viscerally upset by violence against a dog than by sexism, racism, and so on, but sometimes, we just can’t help our instincts. If, like me, you find this difficult to bear, you can be assured that The Dog Is Actually Alive. I did eventually find my way back to the book–it was too good not to do so–and was deeply relieved when, against all odds, the protagonist discovered that her dog had survived.
There. You may now read safely, and finish the book in one sitting. Honestly, I regret having had to pause at all, because this book was fantastic.
THIS BOOK IS AMAZING! Do Not pass it up. This book was in my dreams, thoughts. Man. I tell you what, READ IT! Imagine if you found a door! Would you Knock? Not me, I’m going right in.
Premise of this book is amazing. But,this book took me a while to get into, about50% read before it truly ganged me. I kept reading as this book was for book club. I kept reading because it has such a good premise. I’m glad I did because by the end it really started to come together for me. I ended up really liking January.
January while growing took me some time to get but she found her groove and the book finally exploded. I liked the characters. I liked how it all turned out. January could have her own series. I liked the use of history and the use of the doors. Very clever.
This day and age where so many are trying to not be racist it was fun to read this book and see how January plays into the race issue. How most of the characters become who they are in the time of so much and so much to learn.
I loved this book and wish it had never ended. I cannot wait to read more books by this author!
Read for 2020 Hugos
Although this does have a bit of a slow start, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s a journey, a portal fantasy (literally), and a coming of age story on several levels. There’s mystery, wonder, and some excellent characters. The more I read, the more I was drawn in, until I got to the solid and satisfying conclusion. Definitely recommend.
This is a difficult book to describe. It a coming-of-age story that combines mystery and mysticism. And it challenges what we THINK we know about science and reality. Exceptionally well-written, thoroughly unpredictable, and full of strange and intriguing characters. Definitely a one-of-a-kind read.
January grows up as a motherless, lonely child, under the care of a strict governess and a wealthy benefactor. Her only friend is a young boy who works on the estate. Her benefactor, Mr. Locke is also the man who employs January’s father, sending him on long trips all over the world to collect unusual artifacts. But as January grows up, she begins to discover doors with unusual properties – they allow people to pass from one world to another. Even from one time period to another.
Then, a chance remark January makes at a party (for members of Mr. Locke’s archaeological society) launches a chain of events that sends January on an adventurous journey — where she learns about friendship and loyalty, learns to trust her own intuition and intelligence, experiences racism and poverty, and uncovers secrets that threaten her very existence. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling your own discovery of this unusual and surprising novel.
The author is a self-described author of speculative fiction, a genre with which I was previously unfamiliar. This is her debut novel. Her background is quite interesting and you’ll see that she draws on nearly all of it in this book. You might want to visit her website !
Read this original book!
I loved this book. it has the perfect balance of adventure and magic. Great main character and very interesting premise. Its a fun read despite covering serious personal topics of family. The story is very original and entertaining.
A Wonderful Read!!! May it continue????
Such a beautifully written, haunting story. The descriptions, the story was so immersive that I found myself looking for doors throughout my day.
I really loved the writing. So many wonderful lines I wanted to savor them all. The story of January and her journey of finding out who she is and the meaning of family is really wonderful. A great read.
A beautiful story, wonderfully written. I didn’t want it to end! Highly recommend.
I loved this book. It felt familiar to my imagination and I weirdly kept wishing I had written it myself. I would stop to re-read lines and think, “Yes, I remember this feeling from childhood, and I feel it now.” It was poetic, yet accessible. I was able to fully embrace the first person narrative, which I don’t usually enjoy. There was betrayal, abandonment, love, hope, redemption, and always more twists. This was a powerful book.