Ten Thousand Doors of January | 
I decided to tackle the forgotten bottom tiers of my Litsy to-read list and somehow this book was in the library. I don‘t know why I stacked it though. Well…let‘s see. 😅
#currentlyreading
pick3.5 ⭐️s
a sweeping story of family, unlikely heroes, other worlds, and a magical girl. I loved a lot of this book: the writing, the characters, and especially the overarching story itself and how it all weaved together in the end. Why the 3.5 stars then? I kept feeling taken out of this turn-of-the-century setting with flippant, modern comments. Also, I‘m putting this book away feeling like it isn‘t finished and that I missed something important.
pickThis was a solid portal fantasy with the feel of a fable. Part historical fantasy, part speculative fiction, it includes topics of racism, classism and colonialism. I liked the writing and it was a fast read, but I didn‘t love it. I think I didn‘t completely love the main character. However, I still recommend to those who like some fantasy with historical fiction. 4⭐️
#bookspinbingo!
pickThis book is beautifully written! It's the story of a quest to find home, love, freedom, adventure, and family. It's filled with colorful characters, plot twists, great villains, and a love of words, books, and stories. I am smitten 😍
pickKnew all along I was going to love it, but had to start it a few different times before I felt it clicking — but once it did, it was so charming and enveloping, I didn‘t want it to end. I could have gone on a million more adventures (through a million more doors) with January.
pickAn enjoyable mixture of fantasy and romance - a pleasant surprise!
Page 211 - People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers.
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(Sigh) Reality comes for all of us, sooner or later!
Page 165 - Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.
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This quote speaks to me on so many levels!
so-soWhereas I thought the writing in this book was absolutely beautiful, I did think it was a bit slow to start and the back and forth made it a little slower for me. I really loved this concept and the characters. But, the story itself was not as captivating as I had hoped it would be. I think maybe this is just a tough genre for me, personally because I can respect why this book was so popular, it just wasn‘t my favorite.
pickI adore adore adore this book. One of my favorite tropes is “young girl goes through the door to another world” and this fit the bill perfectly. The longing of being separated from one you love really got to me. I made my mom read it and texted me from a commercial flight saying she was blubbering on the plane. She felt the full range of emotions that I felt with this book. And the cover 😍
I picked up this book to escape from the day and what a perfect choice it was. I love the idea of another world being a very literal door away. There was magic and intrigue and discovering something your soul always knew.
February #bookspin completed ✔️ @TheAromaofBooks
pickThis novel feels similar to Starless Sea w/the same slow-burn story. I savored the descriptions and I know I'll return to it. The world-building is wonderful & the ending makes it all worthwhile. I loved so many of the supporting characters. It could have benefitted from some editing, but give yourself time to enjoy the portals into other worlds, secret society, diverse cast, epic love, and dangerous escapes and you won't be disappointed.
pickIt‘s a feel good kind of fantasy that is engaging and in the realm of a love story.
panIt's a whole lot trickier to find flowers in bloom on the first of January, but I couldn't resist trying for this cover. Would that I was as pleased with the interior as the exterior. I love the Fractured Fables novellas, but I think the key component is brevity. Even when she introduces difficulties and poor choices, all part of a young adult character's growth, one is comforted by the page count that the resolution can't be that far away.
pickI honestly don‘t know what to write here.
I didn‘t read this book as fast as I do some others but that‘s not to say I didn‘t enjoy it. In fact, I loved this book and its storyline as well as the way it was written (though I had my doubts at first). I particularly loved the way everything fit together perfectly and of course the characters!
4⭐️
I wrote it for you.
I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.
January Wordworker, daughter of Adelaide Lee Larson and Yule Ian Scholar, born in the City of Nin and bound for the In-Between. May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.
I don‘t need these blessings translated. I can read them myself, in plainest English: To home. To true love. To Adelaide.
That what was shattered will be made while again.
“Freedom isn‘t worth a single solitary shit if it isn‘t shared.”
There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.
I was so very tired of locked doors.
Maybe all powerful men are cowards at heart, because in their hearts they know power is temporary.
But now I was free. Free to hate him, free to run from him, free to write my own story.
It had both changed and not changed in the last decade. So had the world, I supposed.
It turns out that only in loving you am I brave enough to leave you.
I might be young and untried and penniless and everything else, but -I clutched the pen in my hand until my knuckles were white crests- I was not powerless.
I believed in the black gleam of the ink in the night, in the strength of my own fingers wrapped around the pen, in the reality of that other world waiting just on the other side of some invisible curtain. I believed in second chances and righted wrongs and rewritten stories. I believed in Samuel‘s belief.
It felt like donning a suit of armor or sprouting wings, extending past the boundaries of myself; it felt an awful lot like love.
“If you are willing to try, I believe in you. Strega.”
“Maybe I did not make myself clear before, when I said I was on your side. I meant also that I would be at your side, to go with you into every door and danger, to run with you into your tangled-up future. For” -and a distant part of me as gratified to note that his voice had gone wobbly and strained-“for always. If you like.”
“I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and men are mostly cowards.” He looked directly at me as he finished, with a kind of raised-chin boldness that said: I am not a coward.
“You did not need rescuing, then, it seems,” he said, a wry twist in his smile. “Stregas rescue themselves in all the stories.”
“Stregas?”
“Witches.”
“Bad is on your side.”
My smile sturdied. “Yes.”
“And,” he said more softly, “so am I.”
Did you recognize them for what they were? The insufficient offerings of an absent father? A coward‘s attempt to say: I think of you, always, I love you, forgive me?
Someone, somehow, might forge themselves into a living key, and open the doors.
Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.
Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerised by the sight of our own broken hearts.
“I didn‘t want to be safe, I suppose. I wanted to be dangerous, to find my own power and write it on the world.”
“I met your father in August 1909 in a world of wereleopards and ogres, I very nearly killed him, but the light was fading and my shot went wide.”
I cried as if I‘d been assigned to cry the unshed tears of three people instead of one: my mother, lost in the abyss; my father, lost without her; and me, lost without either of them.
“Our girl will be a fairy tale before she can walk.”
