Book Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January

I haven’t been posting as much recently (thank you, work), but I have been reading.

Mostly reading THIS BOOK.

You can see from some of my previous posts that I’ve been working my way through this. It is available as an ebook at my library, so I could just keep checking it out as long as I want to read it.

The Book

The Ten Thousand Doors of January
Author: Alix E. Harrow
2019
Amazon Link

I have no real warnings surrounding this book, but I suppose it could “trigger” someone who has experienced race-based violence, discrimination, or other negative event. While the book is clearly anti-racist, there are some events in which evil and racist characters do bad things.

Do I think they’re well done? Uh, actually, not really… that being said, I’m as white and pasty as they come, so I might not be a great judge of that. If you want to read what I think is a much, MUCH better anti-racist book with weird magic, I’d suggest Whitehead’s Underground Railroad.

Non-Spoiler Review

This book simply bored me. I made it through, but I stopped midway, read another book in the middle, came back and was still bored, stopped and read another book in between, then finally finished this one. I just couldn’t keep my attention on this because I found it dull.

Why? I guessed the entire plot after getting about a quarter of the way through. The main character wasn’t very active (the whole way through) and just whined a lot. The book contained a lot of purple prose that didn’t even have artistic significance. It was just there and extended the book for a reason I couldn’t fathom.

As well, if you’ve read my review of Fahrenheit 451, you know what’s coming next: the idea that the words are powerful and that the other worlds are kind of like “stories”, even though the other worlds were proven to be real rather than conjectures of a madwoman in the back end, was kind of like an author circle-jerk. I am not a fan of writers including too many explicit references to writing and puffing it up to strange proportions. This book was supposed to be anti-racist, but I found it weird that you could pick out bad guys by them being white men. I found it to be a little weird and a bit too cliché (or opposite-of-cliché) to be appreciable. It was just too easy. I don’t know why, but this book felt like something written by a white person trying to make up for being white. I’m not an expert in race or anything, but something was just… off about it to me.

But mostly just hideously boring.

2/5 Discoball Snowcones

Next week:

An indie book reviewed earlier by Berthold Gambrel is coming up next! Prepare yourself for A Dark Genesis!