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A review by snillum
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
3.75
This was good, but not great.
It had the potential for greatness, and still does. I hope harrow pulls a Samantha shannon and does a re-write in a few years to fix the flaws, and even expand the world building and characters.
The first half is a slog to get through; the change in narrative from first person, to first person journal-style, to third person is jarring and feels like an author trying to be too clever. Trust in the reader to put together the links in your story! You could have just told the story yourself rather than having your characters also try to be authors (like for one of those characters it makes sense, but that should have just been the epilogue)
I’m normally a fast reader but this one had me only reading a few pages a day, if that. The set up was too long for the “big reveal” and it’s not until the final third of the book where you finally see some character development and things start to happen - only for it to then it feel too rushed of an ending.
A satisfactory ending, but a slog to get there.
There was much potential in this. And in the characters created, but unfortunately we don’t delve too deeply into anyone. It’s pretty surface level, which is a shame as the way she writes the imagery of the worlds and the relationships themselves between characters is beautiful.
It had the potential for greatness, and still does. I hope harrow pulls a Samantha shannon and does a re-write in a few years to fix the flaws, and even expand the world building and characters.
The first half is a slog to get through; the change in narrative from first person, to first person journal-style, to third person is jarring and feels like an author trying to be too clever. Trust in the reader to put together the links in your story! You could have just told the story yourself rather than having your characters also try to be authors (like for one of those characters it makes sense, but that should have just been the epilogue)
I’m normally a fast reader but this one had me only reading a few pages a day, if that. The set up was too long for the “big reveal” and it’s not until the final third of the book where you finally see some character development and things start to happen - only for it to then it feel too rushed of an ending.
A satisfactory ending, but a slog to get there.
There was much potential in this. And in the characters created, but unfortunately we don’t delve too deeply into anyone. It’s pretty surface level, which is a shame as the way she writes the imagery of the worlds and the relationships themselves between characters is beautiful.