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The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a gorgeous debut, just GORGEOUS. The cover, the prose, the plot, are all just amazing!

I feel like saying anything more is saying too much, so if that’s all you need to be convinced, stop reading now.  If you need more, get the more, then stop right when you’re over the edge because I knew very little going in and it was just perfect!

The cover is gorgeous.  GORGEOUS! (The artwork also makes a fabulous background for Alix E. Harrow’s website too.)  Am I suggesting this is a good idea in general?  Nope. Does it work out in this case? 100%

Anne Bogel suggested it on What Should I Read Next Podcast, episode 196.

This book is a genre bending title.  I’d call it magical realism with healthy sides of coming of age and mystery, plus a tiny splash of romance.  

Maybe this is just me, but occasionally when I’m reading a book, I have to pause on particular sentences and read them a second, sometimes a third time, because of the way the words flow together to express an idea and to appreciate the poetry in the midst of a novel.  If you enjoy that kind of writing, you should give this book a try. I’m a sucker for fabulous writing, and this title has it in spades!  

But really, what’s this book about you ask.  The book opens in the early 1900s on a young girl who lives with the rich man her father works for collecting artifacts around the world.  With her father generally off on an expedition, January is essentially the ward of Mr. Locke. Her father is dark skinned and has tattoos on his arms, and January is, well, “something in between” is what Mr. Locke calls her.  So, we have issues of race, gender, power, belonging, family, and friendship in the text.  

According to the author’s Goodreads page, this is an adult novel, but it does read a bit like YA, and the author acknowledges the crossover appeal.  I wouldn’t think twice about giving this to most of the high school students I know, but it may be challenging for highly sensitive readers.  There is some language and violence, but it doesn’t feel gory or excessive for the situation.  

Usually within a day or two I am ready to discuss a title, but this one took a bit longer.  The way the story is told is ingenious and sucks you in, the prose is beautiful, and the ending was amazing and the epilogue was fantastic (ok, so honestly, I want more, but it’s very rare I don’t want more from a stand alone, and really, it was enough).  These are the things I need in a book, and I hate spoilers, so I’m going to stop after saying – this book is a door and I am glad I experienced it and will definitely be rereading it.  

~Nikki 

Alix E. Harrow is a full time writer, “former[ly a] student and a teacher, a farm-worker and a cashier, an ice-cream-scooper and a 9-to-5 office-dweller,” who lives in Kentucky with her husband and two children. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is her debut novel that was published on September 10, 2019. It sat on our holds lists for a little while and when it came on Kindle sale in December  I scooped it up for $2.99. I am so glad that I did so that we could read it as our first buddy read book of 2020. I immediately put her sophomore novel on my TBR, The Once and Future Witches, which has a scheduled publication date of October 13, 2020. (Nikki and I both have a love for some witches, and we are excited for this to arrive on our holds list!)

What I really love about this story about stories is that January is another literary heroine. She loves the written word and her love of books and reading is clear from chapter 2:

“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books—those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles—understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn’t about reading the words; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow 

I love reading books that remind me of why I really love books. How and why I love a story and its way to transport the reader into another time and place, with persons so real that you just want to be their friend and join them upon their adventures. Alix Harrow has done that for me with The Ten Thousand Doors of January. I want to be January’s friend, mostly so that I can help her gain her power faster and to subvert the power of Mr. Locke, who dictates her entire life as her guardian, but also to talk books and the bookish life as I do with you dear readers.  As Nikki says, this book has left open so many possibilities for further stories, but Alix has stated that she has no intention to write a sequel, yet.

I highly recommend you sit down with this novel and open your mind to the whys and hows the structures of power and privilege affect our world, and specifically how it affects even just one person in this world, in this case, a young, semi-orphaned, woman of color and no economic means. January comes to know herself, her own power and worth, over the course of the novel (which is why it reads like YA).  During this stressful time of physical distancing and quarantine, do yourself a favor and lose yourself in a really good book for an afternoon or two. Open the door to infinite pleasures with the power of words and story. Then come and talk to me about it, because I’m avoiding all the spoilery things I want to say.

~Ashley