Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book seems to have been lauded by everyone and their mother. Yes, it is ornately written, yes, it has a super intriguing name, yes, it has a GORGEOUS cover. Is there more to it? My personal two cents: NO. The beginning is admittedly full of promise: a little girl grows up in a big, big mansion full of treasures. And one day, she discovers a door in the field, a door that leads to another world. And then… then nothing happens for pages on end. The novel turns into a story within a story, while the little girl herself, at one point not that little at all, mostly moans that although she lives amidst luxury and splendour, nothing is truly hers, and she is not free to do as she pleases (we, regular people, usually just refer to this as ‘being minor’, but never mind). For the entire first half, the book does not seem to be able to decide what it wants to be: a portal story; a racism story; a coming-of-age story; a teenage angst story; a monster story. It is only towards the end that we finally find out that the super intriguing name was only a misnomer and the whole thing was simply a FAMILY MELODRAMA. There is purple prose galore, characters weep or whine all the time, and the shrillest drama is made of most ordinary things. All emotions are amplified to a breaking point, and fancy words like ‘quiver’, ‘teeter’, ‘tremulous’ and ‘temerarious’ are thrown haphazardly around, seemingly in the hope that somewhere, sometime, they will actually make some sense. There are storytelling pearls like: ‘My thoughts were a flock of drunk birds, ricocheting between despair (Would we both be homeless forever? Would I spend my life running?) and a childish, bubbling excitement (Arcadia! Adventure! Escape!) and the distracting warmth...’ Characters repeatedly make inane choices and are—repeatedly—rewarded for them. Like seeing someone for one afternoon and thinking they are the love of your life, then spending 10 years looking for them and ultimately finding they themselves had been looking for you all along, too. There is a social justice dimension that appears to be there mostly because ‘woke’ is en vogue these days. Growing up in a mansion with 20+ (50+??) rooms and a personal maid generally disqualifies you from being socially—or racially—disadvantaged. Just sayin’. The above notwithstanding, I realise that I am in the minority here and that this novel is universally LIKED. There is obviously a market for flowery, whimsical, overly romantical and largely nonsensical (to me) books, and, boy, is it huge! The Ten Thousand Doors of January is clearly a product of the tremendous diversification of the sci fi genre in the last ten years and its opening to female and non-white authors. It has brought us not only masterpieces like Ancillary Justice, The Fifth Season and The Three-Body Problem, but also Becky Chambers’ pioneering ‘fluffy space opera’ and disguised romance novels like this one, whose absence I would not miss in the slightest.