Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Because it’s easy to ignore a woman . . . But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

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I really liked this book. To quote the book itself, it’s “witchy as hell.” Honestly, the only thing keeping me from giving this five stars is that the style of the writing didn’t perfectly gel with me, and that is obviously very subjective. I would looooove to see this adapted as a limited event series on a premium streaming service or network. The premise here is that we’re in an alternate history where magic and witches were once real, not just scapegoats for whatever was […]

How do we write good stories about storytelling

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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By happenstance, I wound up reading Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to The Night Circus, The Starless Sea, within just weeks of one another. Digital library loan hold lists just shake out like that sometimes. And I was struck by how both were, at their heart, doing much the same thing, which is to say, telling stories about the power of telling stories, and doing so through an apparatus of doors that lead into other worlds/stories, and how the encounters with the […]

Gimme gimmie gimmie

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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Ahh I have fallen so far behind. It’s been almost a month since I updated and I have several several reviews to write. So sorry! Okay but .. this book. Read it. As luck would have it, I was at first reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January virtually in tandem with The Starless Sea and both pretty quickly revolve around magic doors acting as portals to other worlds. Unfortunately this had me initially writing January off as a knock-off (I’ll get to it in that review, but Starless […]

“It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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In the early 1900s, January Scaller is a child living a lonely existence. The ward of wealthy Mr Locke, she has only books and a disinterested nursemaid for company. Her father works for Mr Locke and his archaeological society, travelling the world collecting artefacts and rarely coming home. At seven years old January discovers a Door, a crack between worlds, but before she can investigate further it is destroyed. She grows from being a wilful child to a young lady who knows when to keep […]

Knock knock

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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The story begins in 1901, with January Scaller, a young girl who lives in a lovely home in rural Vermont. This home is filled with strange and wonderful objects, found by her father for owner of the home, Mr. Locke. Mr. Locke is a member of a prestigious archaeological society and loves to be known as a collector of wondrous things but prefers not to do the collecting himself. So he sends Julian Scaller on the search, sometimes for months at a time. While Julian […]

Coincidences

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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I wonder about coincidences in books. How does it happen that three books published within months of each other all use Grand Central in NYC as an important location (The Masterpiece, Time After Time, and The Lost Girls of Paris)? How do two fantasy novels published within weeks of each other, The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, both deal with doors connecting worlds, the magical power of writing, and a protagonist who reads their […]



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