The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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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

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Ashley and I have been friends a while, a long while, and we’ve been reading together a bit too.  The quantity of years isn’t as long as we’ve been friends because the quantity of books during some of those years was…sparse, but when we’re on it, we are ON IT!  So much so that, when I text Ashley a number, she knows exactly what it means. Two weeks ago it went like this:

Nikki: New holds high 58!!
Ashley: oh geez woman
Fast forward a few days, we have the conversation about how this post needs to be a thing, a few days past and then last week we have:
Nikki: 60!!!
Ashley: wow
And as of this writing:
Nikki: 62
Ashley: 62 need to not be a number
Nikki: j/k only 61 because I got the boys a new audio book off the list an hour ago
See also:
Nikki: LET’S RECOMMEND ALL THE BOOKS
Ashley: um…

So, here we are.  I have 61 books on hold and you’re all likely wondering how and why and when am I going to read all those titles.  Let me take those one at a time.

How: Well, when one recommends a book to the electronic library, then one is automatically on the hold list for that book if/when it is purchased, regardless of the number of holds one has, even if one has exceed the maximum number of holds.  One may also suspend one’s holds for a very long time (a year is about my personal max so far). Yes, these are all on the electronic library. For the physical library, I only have five (two are for my children and ready for pick up, three are for me and suspended indefinitely because I need to be choosy about when I read a physical book so I get it read in time). 

Why: Why not? Yes, there are books I’d like to put on hold and can’t. Yes, this could stress some readers out (Ashley), but honestly, it doesn’t really bother me. If there’s a title I really need and can’t access without a hold, then there’s always the physical library (see above regarding those holds).  I’ve done this a few times and while it’s not my favorite, I do enjoy having a lot of books on my holds list, so it makes up for it. 

When: Oh dear readers, one eats an elephant (metaphorically speaking) one forkfull at a time, and one reads 61 books one paragraph at a time.  To be more specific, one is (as of an hour ago) an audio book for my children and checked out, two more are tentatively coming to the blog next month, and I have a general personal practice of only allowing a book to be on hold for a year, so that means one more book is coming up in April.  Either I’ll check it out and read it (because I’m definitely #1 in line by the year mark) or I’ll be sure it’s on my wish list and remove my hold. Two of my titles are audio books for me, and I’m not sure at this point if I’ll read or listen to those titles. As far as the quantity and my year limit go, I’m good to go on this until fall with only a couple of books a month until then. However, September has 8, October has 7, and November has 14 (with 11 of those coming through on one day)!  I feel like I may have a new outlook on holds by November, but we’ll see, especially as my reading goal averages to two titles a week (even though last year my average was more like three). One complication in this whole process has been a few Kindle Unlimited Subscriptions in the past oh, year and a half or so. I adore Kindle Unlimited, but it does change my reading habits a bit. I canceled my subscription earlier this month so that I will be forced to can focus more on my holds for a while and see what happens.  

Conveniently, three oldest holds, including the two likely coming to the blog next month, are all under 400 pages, so it feels very do-able, and like a great start to kick off some amazing holds list reading!  Who knows what will happen next? Will I read three books and lower the number? Will the library add 11 new titles on one day again? Stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll have an update at some point, but if you have questions between now and then, let me know!

~Nikki

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The short version is Tara Conklin’s The Last Romantics is a gorgeously-written family saga.  It’s messy and complicated and trigger warnings should abound, but maybe not quite.  Fiona, a poet, tells the story, which is all driven by a question in the first chapter “Who was Luna?” but the book isn’t about Luna at all really, it’s about the journey, which is why I call this book is a saga, spanning nearly 100 years in the life of one family.  The real story starts with our main character is almost five and follows her and her three siblings as they grow. They experience “the failures of love,” they persevere, and they grow up. They figure some things out while others remain elusive. Along the way there are unaddressed mental health issues, abandonment, assault, trauma, addiction, social experiments, tragedy, and more.  This is not an uplifting book, but it’s powerful, thought-provoking, and really stunning.  

I read the first part in one sitting and then had to put the book down for a day and read something lighter (if one can call The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan lighter).  The first part was rough, and it could be more challenging to readers who may have been in households with family members who needed help for mental health concerns or who may feel abandoned by a parent.  I felt better about reading the second part. Perhaps I had better walls up, perhaps it didn’t hit as close to home for me, and I was definitely more well rested for that portion.  

If structure is your thing, this novel is told in four parts, as the narrator reflects back upon her past from 2079, when she’s 102 years old and giving a talk about her life and works of poetry.  Structure isn’t usually my thing, and it’s not here, but I do still appreciate the logical nature and how it is beautifully tied in with the text. Fiona has a story to tell about one of her published works, a story she’s never told before and this is her first talk in 25 years, so she knew it was coming.  We read her story in 2079, and we read it in 1981, with some interjections from the “present” and it all makes perfect sense, or it did to me, without having to go back and forth to remember what year it is (I’m looking at you All the Light We Cannot See).  

A good epilogue is definitely my thing.  While this book doesn’t technically have an epilogue, the last chapter includes a really lovely wrap up for each member of Fiona’s nuclear family.  It’s not unusual for me to finish a book and still be wanting to know what happens next, but you all know that about me already. There are a couple of characters I’d love to know more about because much of their story takes place outside of these pages, and I would really like a better picture of the author’s vision for 2079.  It’s not that far in the future, but it doesn’t feel like a simple fast forward.  

In the prologue, Fiona says this is a story about the failures of love, then at the end she says that’s wrong, “it’s about real love, true love.  Imperfect, wretched, weak love. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love” and that’s it exactly. There are failures of love in this story, but there are also successes, amidst tragedy, so there is hope, even if I wouldn’t call this a hopeful book.  Fiona tells the readers in the opening pages, “I’ve always been wary of love, you see. Its promises are too dizzy, its reasons too vague, its origins murkier than mud.” Ultimately this is a book about love, both romantic and familial, with all its warts and scars. I would love to read the blog “The Last Romantics” and The Love Poem, but I don’t see myself rereading  The Last Romantics, but maybe one day I will.  That said, I am very glad to have read it once and hope you read it and value the experience as well.  

~Nikki

The Last Romantics is author Tara Conklin’s sophomore novel. I feel so strongly about her gorgeous prose that her debut, The House Girl is now on my TBR and her future releases will be highly anticipated. I constantly saw the book advertised a lot early in the year as it was the Barnes and Noble Bookclub pick for February 2019 – so that alone made it intriguing for me. (I didn’t start joining in the bookclub until their April selection of Martha Hall Kelly’s Lost Roses. For more information about Barnes and Noble’s Bookclub go here – or message me directly.)

The biggest thing that is not apparent by the title is that this book is not a romance novel. It is unequivocally a family drama/saga of contemporary fiction. The majority of the plot takes place between the mid 1980’s and early 2010’s but spans the life of the 102 year old Fiona Skinner. We follow her and her three siblings, Renee, Caroline, and Joe from their fictional hometown of Bexley, Connecticut, to New York City, Miami, Florida, and other locales specific to each sibling. It’s about how they came together after the death of their father, fell apart, and came together again – basically just navigated life together as human beings who through it all really, truly loved each other. Nota Bene [Nikki: ‘good to note’ for those of us who didn’t take Latin]: Their father’s death is not a spoiler, the first line of chapter one is: “In the spring of 1981, our father died.” So don’t be getting on my case for that.

I really felt the struggles of each of the sisters at different points of their lives, and I think this book quietly speaks to feminism, patriarchy, and different types of privilege in just the way my girlfriends and I discuss it in everyday conversation and interactions. It’s not usually some angry “let’s topple the system” – sometimes it is – but more often it’s trying to help ourselves realize what is going on and make a conscious effort to be and do better NOW so that we can change the future and the way future generations handle life. Especially life on this planet, that seemed to be a very big deal in the 2079 of this book, but it can only be inferred that whatever was done was too little, too late for the planet and modern life in general.

As in many family dramas, the story of the Skinner children is not without its happy moments, problems, scary times, and possible triggering scenarios for the reader. It expresses all the gross and the beautiful things that LIFE has to give us. I’m giving this book a solid 4.5 stars.

The following quotation requires me to give the book a 4 star review, because it reminded me exactly of how my mother calls puberty “The Aliens.”

“The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.” 

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

It’s totally aliens.

~Ashley

PS: I want to point out some symbolism on the cover of The Last Romantics, but I don’t want to be spoilery about the symbolism, either. I want you to look at the vines on the cover, where they begin and end, and especially where they intersect. Please discuss with me in the comments or by personal message.