book

[psocoptera]

The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow. I don't think I was in the best frame of mind to read this book... I found the racism grueling to read through, given the current racist policies of our government (which I guess always has racist policies but the open not-caring about Black and brown lives in this pandemic is particularly on my mind at this time), and also I've been pretty exhausted and mentally scattered, so I really wasn't putting clues together or picking up on things until the book was really blatant about it and I was like "ohhh". SPOILER Although Locke was obviously the big bad, you have a character named "Locke" in a book about someone closing doors? Yeah. While we're behind this cut, I was kind of annoyed that one of the evil imperialists turned out to also be a vampire, like, I get why he needed to be for plot reasons, but honestly we have plenty of evil just with regular imperialists. Anyways, I did enjoy it, and I think it's a better book than I was maybe giving it credit for, like, it is nicely constructed and has some good sequences and some bits with a vivid sense of place. I can see why it made the awards ballots and wouldn't rule out a win (although it's not where I'm putting either my bet or my vote). I definitely prefer it as a contemporary take on portal fantasies to the Wayward Children series. :/ Content notes for animal harm, child harm, period-typical racism. (Uh, which to be clear, Harrow is very much against! *Book* isn't racist, just, it portrays early-20th-century USian racism.)