Loved it! An ode to adventure, to keep on going through new doors, to live your best stories. A commentary on home, race, and courage. Wonderful world(s) building, really well written.

What an enchanting and endearing story!

First off I must say I have had this ARC on my TBR list for a long time. It is not my usual genre but I wanted to try something different. To my surprise I also found this audio on Libby from my local library. So, why not try something else that is new to me? Listening and reading along on my kindle. I admit I did not do that for very long but it was fun in bits. I mostly alternated between the written book and the audiobook. The writing is just beautiful and magical. The audio was mesmerizing and the narrator was perfect for the story!

Reading and listening to this story made me feel like a child again! I was hooked from the beginning. This novel takes you on a magical journey through different worlds. The main character, January, lives in a big house on Mr. Locke's estate in the early 20th century. Her father works for him but is often away traveling the world in search of rare items that Mr. Locke may require. One day January, finds a book entitled, "The Ten Thousand Doors" and begins to read it. At one point the story changes and the story told is the one she is reading. I admit I was a little confused at that point but quickly realized what was happening. For the most part I really enjoyed the storytelling although the book switches from 1st person to 3rd person depending on what characters story is being told.

Even though Fantasy is not a genre I usually read or enjoy, I would say this book was the exception for me. It is worthy of all its praise. Very beautifully written and such an original concept! I loved the ending. It was simply perfect.

I'd like to kindly thank NetGalley and Redhook Books for granting me access to this Advance Reader Copy. I'm sorry it took me this long to read!

I absolutely adored this book. I waited to read this because of all the hype and in the past I have been disappointed with hyped up books. This was no disappointment! Magic portals, bad-ass women, fury companions, and villains you love to hate. Everything you love in a great story. I received a free ebook from #Netgalley for review.

I just reviewed The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. #TheTenThousandDoorsOfJanuary #NetGalley
[NetGalley URL

Absolutely fantastic. It made no sense until it did, and by then I was so in love with the story that I couldn't put it down. Who doesn't want a love story that crosses universes?

I got this from Netgalley two summers ago. I was on a private island and this was the perfect addition to my vacation. The writing is sophisticated and poetic. The story is magical and you get sucked into the main character's story immediately. Definitely one of my favorite books of 2019.

I really struggled with this book. I wanted to love it but in the end I just felt meh. The pacing of the plot was all over the place and the reveal of certain aspects of the story felt oddly timed. There were few moments of true action and instead most of the book felt like it consisted of conversations where plot points were told rather than shown, which is a pet peeve of mine.
One thing I did appreciate is that all of the characters felt very distinct from one another. I definitely think all of the bones of a good story were there it just needed to be a bit more polished and better paced.

This reads almost like a memoir. It’s told in first person with occasional chapters of a book within a book. The narration was very much someone telling us a story, so it felt a little removed or distant for me from the actually actions..

The concepts of doors or fractured between worlds was very interesting. I liked January as a protagonist. I would recommend this book if you like fantasy that has an almost scientific flavor to it. The concept is creative and it’s obvious a lot of time was put into the story.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review

This was the first Harrow I read, and I immediately became a Harrow die-hard! I have pre-ordered every other book she has written since. I love her lyrical writing style and how distinct her characterization is!

**Thank you Netgalley, Alix E. Harrow, and Redhook Books for an advanced reader copy of this book.**

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is so beautifully written. The lyrical writing paired with elements of fantasy makes this book wonderful to read. January is such a fun character and I loved watching her grow throughout the story.

I enjoyed going on the different journeys with January and watching her fall in love. I also enjoyed how Harrow named each character aptly by their character traits. It was fun to unravel the mysteries that were in this book. The descriptions were fantastic and the magical elements were very well done.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alex E. Harrow is a great example of what an author can do with strong storytelling tools in their arsenal. From the characterization, imagery and word play, this novel artfully takes the reader on a journey of adventure that they're sure to enjoy. I look forward to recommending this title to future patrons and suggesting it in future purchase requests.

4/5 stars

I loved the writing style and the world the author created. I felt that the format of a book within a book did make the pacing drag for me. Overall, it was a good Fantasy with beautiful writing.

We meet January Scaller when she is seven. January is named after the god Janus, with two faces that forever looked ahead and back. He is the symbol for duality, for seeing possibilities and facing past mistakes. January is the child of Julian, a black explorer and Adelaide, a strong white woman. She has never met her mother and doesn't even know her name. She sees her father infrequently. He travels the world seeking out lost antiquities and precious items for her guardian, Cornelius Locke. Locke is a wealthy man of impecable background who is the president of an antiquities preservation society. He employs Julian and watches over January while Julian travels.

January survives by being a good girl. She travels with Locke and is treated with respect as his ward, not how she would be treated on her own as a mixed race child with no money. She is quiet and studious but that changes when at age seven she discovers a door. It is out in a field all by itself and as she got close, she started to feel the pull of the unexplained, the feeling that what lay beyond would answer all her questions. But as she starts to go through, Mr. Locke calls her and she pulls back. The next day the door is gone, only a pile of rubble in a field.

That day stays with January however and the way the door made her feel. When she is seventeen, she finds a quaint book hidden and seemingly meant for her. It is a story of her background and of doors and the magic that can lay beyond them. January is determined to set out to find more doors and to find her father who has disappeared on one of his journeys. Perhaps she can find her own story and clues about the mother of whom she knows nothing.

January does find doors and as she does, she comes to realize that her life has been shuttered and only bits of her history have been revealed. Mr. Locke is less the kindly guardian who has raised her and more an exploiter of both her family and the antiquities that propel his purpose. January comes to realize that the doors she finds all over the world may eventually give her the answers to her background and give her the family she has wanted all her life.

This is a debut novel which was highly anticipated as Alix Harrow had already made a name for herself as a short story author. It is a coming of age story that hints at the mystery and wonder that the world can provide. January is an entrancing personality and the reader cannot help but cheer her on. This book is recommended to readers of young adult and fantasy literature.

I did not finish this book. I just couldn’t get into it. I really tried as this seems like a type of story I’d really enjoy.

This may be a case of me hearing so much hype about the book that I was doomed to be disappointed. I'm a little burned out on YA right now, and this is very much a YA book. January (the name of the book's main character) is a sheltered young girl who grows up secluded in her guardian's mansion while her father travels the world, finding rare artifacts. She discovers that she has amazing special powers, doesn't think about how to use them practically for quite some time, and has faithful companions who love her (a Black lady's companion for her, a boy who loves her passionately even though he's only had one conversation with her since they were both seven years old, and a wonderful dog) all of whom suffer far more than she does for her sake.

Also, of the ten thousand doors of the cover, we only see the other side of two.

This is a book that would have been more interesting from the point of view of just about any of the other characters in the book. January's mother roamed the ten thousand worlds after first falling in love with January's father and then losing the door to his world. January's mom was a bad-ass, and I would have loved to read about her adventures. January's dad, although he's a horrible father whos' afraid of his daughter, also goes on many exciting adventures and sees wondrous things. Jane: she found a world full of leopard-women and earned herself a place in their hunt, found herself a polyamorous relationship, and is also a bad-ass. Honestly, even January herself, once she's grown up and gets to actually travel the worlds, would have been better than this origin story that never delivered what I'd hoped. I wish this had not been a YA origin story, but I guess that's the story that the author wanted to tell. A world-hopping book has the potential to do so much with character growth, imaginative settings, exciting plots! This book was a heroine who had to figure out who she was and learn confidence in herself and find that her guardian didn't have her best interests at heart and also find her parents. Honestly, this didn't even need to have the world-hopping part, the book's story could have worked without it.

Also, when a heroine is imprisoned in an asylum and she manages to gain access to a book and she knows that she can change reality if she writes something and BELIEVES in it, why wouldn't she use the book to escape the asylum instead of sitting there and READING THE BOOK INSTEAD OF USING IT TO WRITE HERSELF A PASSAGE OUT. Lack of urgency there, January.

I loved the magical worlds and when a main character loves books the same way that I do, I am always more invested. A little slow and lost my interest at times but totally worth sticking it out.

I really loved the writing of this novel as well as the characters we had the pleasure of meeting.

The writing was beautiful and captivating and the characters had a lot of unique personalities and features that appealed to me.

The thing that made me not love this book as much was how slow this book got at times. I am not a big fan of slow burn novels and this novel was one.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for people who are like me, but if you don’t mind a slower moving novel I would say this novel has everything you could want in a novel.

It’s not often that a book can carry you back down the rabbit hole of all of your childhood wonderings and daydreams but The Ten Thousand Doors of January really hit the mark for me.

This imaginative tale is a coming-of-age story about a young girl, January, as she discovers where she came from and finds out who she wants to become. It’s about the boundless power of words, stories and doors that transport you to new worlds. This book contains it all. Love, family, adventure, magic, villains, fantasy worlds, and an overprotective, scruffy dog that I adore. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to make their reading life a little more magical.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I had hoped I would have. I ended up listening to the book through audio through most of it, which may have contributed to not loving it. It was also not what I expected at all. I thought the fantasy elements would be more at the forefront of the story, but the other elements were more important to the story.
For more of my thoughts about the book, please check out my full review in the link.

This book felt like a love letter right to my heart. The magic of the doors to another world, the quest for a lost love, the struggle to believe and trust and keep hoping for a better world... it broke my heart. This is the kind of book that leaves you sighing in a kind of painful pleasure while you clutch the book to your chest and wish, for a brief moment, that the story could be Real.

How do I put into words this book. I've had an advanced reader copy of this book since A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies won in the Hugo's 2019. Then picked up a second kindle copy & an audible, because I wanted to author to get the proceeds from it, as well.

How do I talk about this book. If A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies is a love letter to books, then Ten Thousand Doors is a love letter to stories themselves. Harrow's writing continues to be magical, and her prose is nothing short of heartrending at most turns. This was such a good tale of universally crossed lovers and learning about portals, what makes a home a home and a person a person.

I ended up very happy and very sad in different places. Harrow's works always have a handful of moments where I nearly start tearing up because the feelings being experienced by her protagonists or shared in the prose are simply that poignant.