The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 5/5 cats
i mean, it’s a perfect book.
that should be the alpha and the omega of this book review, because you’ve probably already read the synopsis, and if it takes more than that to convince you of this book’s desirability, i’m sure i don’t have the words to do it.
if you like seanan mcguire’s wayward children series, you will probably enjoy this. obviously, they both involve doorways to other worlds, young(ish) protagonists, and adventure, but their more significant shared characteristics are tonal—haunting and yearning and saddish; themes of displacement and otherness and an aching inability to fit into the world, how it feels to be “an in-between sort of thing.”
it also made me think of The Book of Speculation and Saga, with how it handles its themes of fate, family and separation, and in its use of books and letters to carry the narrative. all of these books have given me a very specific and rare kind of sadness-shiver, and i’m always gladdened to encounter another source.
it is a formidable debut—the concept, the characters, the language; she’s got it all on lock; there’s a richness to her prose that sparkles up off the page and there’s a VERY GOOD DOG named bad. even the romantic subplot, which ordinarily activates my eyeroll-muscles, was perfect and understated and my eyeballs remained unrolled.
there are enough unfinished edges and unexplored territory that this could easily expand into a second book or series, but i kind of don’t want it to. i definitely want her to write more words for me to read, but the bittersweet ambiguity of the ending is perfect and i want to just close the book and leave them to work the rest out unobserved.
i mean, it’s a perfect book.
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it’s some top-notch book schwag when even the mailing envelope is fancy
this is the debut novel by the woman who wrote Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage, which i LOVED, and is one of those free tor shorts you can read here while you wait for this book to come out.
oh, and now MORE! a bookmark handmade by alix e. harrow herself! am i charmed? i AM!
my TBR stack might just kill me, but i will die happy. and squashed. happy and squashed.
