The Ten Thousand Doors of January: A Spellbinding Portal Fantasy Book Review

Read time: 5 minutes

🎧 Listened in audio 📢 Narrated by January LaVoy ⏱ Duration: 12 hours
Genre: Fantasy 🏷️ Publisher name: Hachette Audio and Redhook

Book Blurb:

In the early 1900s, January Scaller is the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, kept among the peculiar treasures filling his sprawling mansion like one more curiosity. Carefully maintained but largely overlooked, she has always felt out of place, until she finds a strange book that carries the scent of other worlds. Its pages tell of secret doors, love, adventure, and danger, and the more January reads, the more the story mirrors her own life. Lush, richly imagined, and lyrical, The Ten Thousand Doors of January follows one girl’s journey toward impossible truths, unforgettable love, and the doors that might finally lead her home.

Let’s talk about the book:

This book landed on my Libby recommendations completely out of nowhere, and honestly, the premise (doors connecting a thousand worlds) didn’t grab me right away. I went in mostly on author loyalty, because Alix Harrow earned that from me a while back. And then the book just… took me apart. By the last page I was on my knees, no exaggeration. Alix Harrow, you absolute GENIUS!

The whole idea that these doors only appear where the fabric of reality has worn thin shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s the kind of magic system that feels less invented and more remembered, like Harrow found the true explanation for every strange threshold you’ve ever walked through without noticing. I kept thinking, quietly, that this could be real, and that’s rare.

Then there’s the little detail I didn’t see coming: a book about a woman named January, narrated by a woman named January. LaVoy. That is not a coincidence I take lightly, and it made me grin at my headphones on a completely random Tuesday.

But the doors and the worlds, wild as they are, aren’t even the best part of this book. It’s the relationships that got me. The ache between two people who love each other across worlds and years. What a parent will do for a child, what a child carries for a parent, even after that parent is gone and somebody kinder has stepped in to fill the space. That kindness is beautiful, and it matters, but it never replaces the original song. Blood always sings.

The part that made this book so special:

One line I have not stopped turning over since I finished this: “You don’t fall in love. You discover love.” That’s just true, isn’t it? Falling implies an accident, something that happens to you. Discovering means you find out you were always capable of more than you thought. You go looking, and you come back different.

And January LaVoy. LaVoy, if you ever read this, you didn’t narrate this book, you lived inside it. You made Julian real enough to ache over. Adelaide’s story got the whole arc of ache, longing, adventure, and strength. Sindbad felt like he would jump of of the audiobook and bark. Samuel and Jane, too, each one distinct, each one alive. You believed in this story so completely I had no choice but to believe in it right along with you.

Would I recommend it?

Without a single hint of hesitation, yes. If you love stories that ask you to believe in something a little bit impossible, in doors and worlds and words that summon, this one will wreck you in the best way. Alix Harrow’s writing is spellbinding, and January LaVoy’s narration turns every page into something you can practically feel. This is easily one of my favorite listens this year, maybe ever. Go find this book. Go now.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

5 book recommendations

• The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow — If this one made you fall for Harrow’s writing, this is her follow-up: same lyrical, worldbending prose, this time built around suffrage, sisterhood, and reclaimed magic.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern — Another book obsessed with doors, hidden worlds, and the way stories fold into real life, perfect if the “impossible but almost believable” magic here is what hooked you.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — A quieter, stranger cousin to this book, built around a single impossible world instead of thousands, but with the same sense that reality might be thinner than we think.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik — For the same richly imagined, fairy-tale-soaked prose style, wrapped around a different kind of danger and a different kind of found love.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab — If the “love across time and worlds” thread is what got you, this one carries that same ache across centuries instead of doors.
  Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

What do you say — could you find your own door?

Book Links

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Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org
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