The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E Harrow

[sophia_sol]

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is making very deliberate choices with its narrative voice, to have the voice be noticed, noticeable, rather than having a more transparent style that gets out of the way so you can focus on the story. And generally speaking I approve of these kinds of experimental voices, but this one doesn't quite land for me. It feels very self-conscious in a way that doesn't work for me.

The Hugo Voter's Packet only includes an excerpt of the first 100 pages, and there's too many holds on my library's ebook copy for me to have a hope of reading it that way, and my impressions of the first 100 pages are not strong enough for me to have any desire to buy a copy of the book. There's not enough else going on to draw me in beyond the voice, to want to put in the work of reading past what I don't like. I was just kind of bored. So here we go. This can't be a proper book review because I didn't actually finish the book, but figured I would record my impressions regardless as I make my way through the Hugo nominees.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

I liked the highly stylized narrative voice, until I got to the book-within-a-book and realized that, although it isn't supposed to be the same narrator, it has the same voice.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, that part didn't work for me either! I also found it confusing. Possibly it would make more sense if I kept reading beyond the 100 pages but as it was it felt kind of out of nowhere.

[cahn]

ALL OF THIS. The narrative voice also has to belong to a teenage (or possibly older?) girl and it just doesn't work for me as it sounds rather pretentious and like someone I wouldn't like at all in real life. I don't think I even got to 100 pages.

While I'm here, content note for Middlegame which I'm reading right now -- a fair amount of gore and people killing other people. That's not by any means the whole book, and it's fairly well telegraphed when something gory is about to happen, so you could probably skip through most of that, but just so you know it's there... (Other than that I quite like the book, actually, it's quite compelling, but it doesn't necessarily overlap with things that I know you like.)

[sophia_sol]

I mean I can absolutely believe in a teenager having that kind of pretentious voice, and I wouldn't even put it past my younger self for having had a writing style that people would think of as pretentious, but that doesn't mean I enjoyed reading it :P

Thanks for the content notes for Middlegame, I appreciate the heads-up as to what to expect!