Audiobook Review: Portals to Elsewhere

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow

Narrated by January la Voy

Published: September 2019

Summary from GoodReads:

In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.

Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

Confession:

I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I had read it. It was not because of the narrator, January LaVoy did a lovely job, but it had more to do with the format of the chapters and the audiobook in general. But before I get into the issues, I want to talk about this wonderful story, that I ended up really enjoying.

January was such an interesting character to spend time with. I felt sorry for her much of the time because of how lonely she must have felt as a child growing up in that fusty old mansion. But she does grow and even thrives with an inner strength that really helps her out when she discovers how much she has been lied to all of her life. She appears docile and obedient on the outside, but on the inside, she is sarcastic and witty. Her life is totally changed when she discovers a book that, as she reads, realizes that it is one written only for her.

I really liked the story within a story aspect of this book. It was really incredible how the author eventually intertwined these two stories and made them into one. The second story was also a good way to give more information about the doorways and how they work in a more interesting way. I especially appreciated the different types of worlds that the characters experienced. The writing was excellent as was the world building. This is a historical fantasy set in the late 1800s to early 1900s for most of the book. The author did an excellent job of relating that time period accurately and all of the societal issues as well.

Some of my issues with the audiobook stem from the book’s overall format. Books with exceptionally long chapters do not translate well to audio, particularly when there are no clear breaks in the narrative. In a written book, you often see larger spaces between paragraphs or perhaps a decorative line indicating a break of some sort. These types of pauses are harder to identify in audiobooks unless the producers purposely include them. For instance, there is a scene where January is drugged and blacks out. The next sentence, without the narrator even taking a breath, abruptly transitions to her waking up in the hospital. Such moments are quite jarring and they occurred frequently throughout the book. I kept thinking that I was missing important details and would often rewind to make sure. The other thing that would have been nice but not completely necessary is to have a different narrator for the chapters that belong to the other book. It just would have made it clearer that this was a different story being told by a totally different character.

So even though I enjoyed listening to January LaVoy read this book, I’m not sure that I would recommend this audiobook. I did ultimately enjoy the story, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it instead.