The Ten Thousand Doors of January

By: Alix E. Harrow

Narrated by: January LaVoy

Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

"A gorgeous, aching love letter to stories, storytellers and the doors they lead us through...absolutely enchanting." (Christina Henry, best-selling author of Alice and Lost Boys)

Los Angeles Times best seller!

In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a 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.

©2019 Alix E. Harrow (P)2019 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"LaVoy's theatrical skills delight as she narrates January's thrilling story of fantastical characters and new worlds-and the tale hidden within the pages of her book."—AudioFile

"LaVoy's assured, mellifluous narration pairs well with the vivid lyricism of Harrow's spellbinding fantasy, and her dexterity with characters fleshes out the wondrous and strange beings on each page."—Seattle Times

"One for the favorites shelf... Here is a book to make you happy when you gently close it. Here you will find wonder and questions and an unceasingly gorgeous love of words which compasses even the shape a letter makes against a page."—NPR Book

I love this book.

If it calls to you, just step through and listen.
It is resonant and beautifully rendered.

Enjoyed the book although it veers towards melodrama

I’m not sure that the moments of dimness that the hero exhibits at crucial moments fits with her character, but the world in the book is interesting. Once the hero got older, these lapses of judgment became harder to beat and I found myself avoiding the book for a couple of days at a time. It really felt like Perils of Pauline for a while mid-way through the book. I finally put it at 1.5x speed just to get to the ending. I liked that the hero is mixed race and the time period of the book was really smart because I could see her being able to get away with some things in 1910 that would have been impossible twenty years earlier.

Magical and novel story with an original premise

An in-between girl in early 1900s Vermont finds a door to another world and a mysterious book in an Egyptian chest that leads her on an epic journey of self-discovery. Her (sort of) foster father, Cornelius Locke, cares for her and protects her but also keeps her caged by civility and on display like one of his strange archeological exhibits. January Scaller finds out there are more secrets about the world than she could have imagined and that she's deeply connected to people and places that both thrill and terrify her.

I thoroughly enjoyed this debut novel by Alix E. Harrow. The premise is unique and not a story I've read before exactly. I liked the language, although some words became repetitious. I also liked the character development and loved Harrow's writing style. The momentum carried a good pace. I was less than 20% from the end and still engaged, wondering how all the questions would be answered in such a short amount of time remaining.

I'm not typically a fan of magical realism, but The Ten Thousand Doors of January was suspenseful at times and emotional and overall a good story. Would recommend to book lovers as we understand how there's power in books that can transport you to elsewhere. This book inspired my imagination.

Good narrator. Excellent at conveying emotion, but some characters' voices were too similar.

I did not like how naive January remained, even almost to the end. I would have thought someone with her talent could put together the pieces a little more quickly and astutely.

Stunning

Beautiful, enchanting and deeply soul touching. A manifesto to all dreamers, storytellers and readers. I haven’t read something so beautiful and satisfying in a long time.
Give it a try... you won’t regret it.

An Overwrought Reading of an Overwritten Story

The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019) by Alix E. Harrow has a promising premise, an ambitious attempt at a UFT (Unified Fantasy Theory): all the myths, legends, fairy tales and so on (including all their magical artifacts and supernatural beings, as well as much of the change, revolution, and evolution in history) derive from portals between worlds. Ten thousand such “Doors” (ten thousand representing an infinite number) exist connecting countless worlds, and “leakage” happens when inhabitants pass between worlds and bring or carry away artifacts and ideas and the like.

Seventeen-year-old January Scaller is telling her story in 1911, starting with when she was a “temerarious” and imaginative seven-year-old girl of color and traveled in 1901 from Vermont to Kentucky with the wealthy white collector Mr. Locke. She left their hotel, wandered into a field, and found a blue Door, through which she briefly entered another world with an exotic and beautiful island city. Mr. Locke, her guardian while her father Julian is off looking for exotic artifacts, burned the blue Door and set about educating all such “fanciful nonsense” out of her and training her up to be a “good girl.” Increasingly unhappy, January’s life changed again when as a teenager she found a book called The Ten Thousand Doors of January in Mr. Locke’s house and discovered that it was written by her father about, at first, a girl from Kentucky called Adelaide “Ade” Lee Larson, and later about his own past and January’s mother and how they came to know Mr. Locke and so on and so forth. Chapters from his book read by January alternate with chapters of January telling her own story. Just what January’s father is doing for Mr. Locke and just what Mr. Locke’s creepy New England Archeological Society is up to are mysteries that January will find out about as she struggles to grow up and find her own voice and purpose.

The writing by Harrow is often fine, with potent lines and similes describing characters and feelings and Doors and so on. The beginning is great: “When I was seven I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing.” There are many other impressive similes, like “as if an invisible housewife was tugging at the corners of reality,” and “Both Bad and Sammy looked like they had died and been reanimated by a sorcerer of questionable skill.”

She has a sense of humor, like “Good manners are advisable when dealing with strangers or ghosts.”

The story’s heart is in the right place, criticizing gender and racial and class discrimination and promoting imagination, fantasy, and change. (It makes a couple nods to different sexualities while keeping the protagonist safely heterosexual.) Harrow writes pointed lines like, “You don't know how fragile your name is until you watch a rich man drag it away like signing a bank loan.”

The book has other virtues, like being a compact stand-alone novel instead of a first doorstopper volume in a series. However, the novel also has numerous problems…

One is that despite early 20th-century bêtes noirs of racism, sexism, and classism and references to early 20th-century fiction like Oz, White Fang, and Tom Swift, the story doesn’t FEEL like America circa 1910, unlike, say, The Golem and the Jinni (2013) by Helene Wecker. January talks like a contemporary girl (e.g., “The hell I will”). Why did Harrow set it a hundred+ years ago and not, say, now? To do race and gender commentary without criticizing contemporary American culture?

Worse problems involve January being incredibly and unbelievably obtuse at key moments, so Harrow can make the plot go. She has January not realize important things like the identities and relationship to her of the young lovers in her father’s book and the identity of the rich white man who made an offer to Ade’s family etc. long after the reader has figured them out, such that when January finally has a moment of revelation, her surprise feels absurd.

At one point, January knows an enemy has gotten the drop on her via a magical feather that bestows invisibility on the bearer, but when she gets the guy at her mercy, she only takes his magical compass. It seems like Harrow wanted January to be visible for the ensuing climactic showdown without thinking of a more believable way to make that happen.

When you give a character a powerful ability like, say, being able to write anything she wants to change the world (short of bringing back the dead), you must then think of good reasons for her not to use that ability when she obviously could but doesn’t. Such mood breaking plot contrivances don’t only involve January. Jane has been hunting forest ogres in another world for 22 years or so and is super capable and alert, but at one point Harrow has her stay sleeping while January takes her heavy pistol from her waist and then has her not notice that the pistol is missing while pursuing a villain until she finally tries to draw it, all so Jane can be wounded for the plot.

Exacerbating the unbelievable obtuseness of her characters is Harrow’s tendency to overwrite. She almost never meets a situation without thinking up a cool simile or metaphor to describe it, as with voices: “like a mummy clearing its throat of grave dust,” “like a disused hinge,” “as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows,” etc. Some of her metaphors feel strained, like “My thoughts were a flock of drunk birds ricocheting between despair… and a childish bubbling excitement.” Corny or absurd lines occur, like “Hearts aren't chess boards, and they don't play by the rules.” For dramatic effect, she starts overusing the rhetorical strategy of structural repetition, e.g., “I felt... felt... felt...” and “Away from... away from... away from...”

The irritating effect of all that overwriting is exacerbated by the reader, January Lavoi, whose over-emoting, lengthening of vowels, and strenuously different voices (like January’s little girl voice) begin irritating the ears. The two overdone forces--Harrow’s writing and Lavoi’s reading--make each other seem ever more overwrought, until the whole thing is hard to continue listening to, especially when January is so often unconvincingly obtuse. Thus, this ambitious fantasy novel irritated more than impressed, and I felt relieved to finish the audiobook.

great story, lovely writing

Great book, very much enjoyed it. Lots of things to think about and ponder within an exciting fantasy.

Unique

Rich story telling with lots of unexpected twists and turns. Loved it. Great narrator too.

Favorite book this year

These words are beautiful. All of it. Truly Amazing. Not my usual genre, but so glad I listened to it.

a short and sweet family love story

I downloaded this on a whim about a year ago and I'm sad I didn't listen sooner.

Meh. Reptitive, florid metaphors and off accents.

The constant descriptive metaphors, many of them repeated many times, went from annoying to grating to a drinking game. The narrator was to breathily melodramatic, and although she did a good generic African accent, the same accent was used for a young Italian American kid....? Was confusing.
I found the plot pretty obvious and predictable. The main theme was beaten to death and way too drawn out to be satisfying... I'm just really, really surprised this book won so many awards.
Best left for young teens, I think.