Alix E. Harrow: Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019, Little, Brown Book Group Limited)
384 pages
English language
Published Nov. 2, 2019 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
It's well written, but not strikingly original. I liked it, but clearly sort of a YA kind of thing.
Content warning Spoiler for a story twist, cw death, animal harm, self harm
It's a little flat. Fantastical but enough racism to just sort of suck the air out of it. I really resented the >>spoiler<< dead dog switcharoo even though I kinda saw it coming. When the >>spoiler<< dead mum turned up alive then the >>spoiler<< dead dad did too then dead friend then dead great aunt ... it was a bit of a struggle to not just nope out.
The worldsbuilding is solid. The characters are solid. Representation of POC is great. One character is in a pan polycule, which is rad. The rest is OK, (pacing, plot, etc.) just very predictable. It's fairly YA but for the self harm. (One day I'll happen upon a novel for grown-ups & faint dead away)
I listened on audio book. I enjoyed parts but felt it went on a bit too long and jumped around a lot, but not in a good way. I was bored by the end. It didn't really ever grab my attention
I really wanted to like this but the over-the-top flowery prose, uneven pacing and style of the book-within-the-book didn't agree with me. I'm also a little tired of woke white women trying to write about issues of race that they've clearly never experienced. And yeah - TECHNICALLY the character isn't REALLY a PoC, but that's a pretty lame loophole. That said, the middle part of the novel was a nice bit of escapism and verged on being a real page-turner. I feel like the author might have some real chops if she can mature past the too-in-love-with-itself prose style.
