The Ten Thousand Doors of January

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Summary and review, no spoilers.

This story mainly takes place in the first few years of the 20th Century, and at the start of the book, it is 1901. The setting (for the most part) is the Eastern Seaboard, where Mr. Cornelius Locke is the multi-millionaire owner of several estates and the head of the New England Archaeological Society.

The story is told from the point of view of his charge, little January Schaller. January is obviously a mixed-race child, but she knows little of her background. She is a small child at the start of the book, but we follow her and her adventures as she goes through her teenage years. . We also know very little about January’s background other than her father - a black man - who Mr. Locke has hired to go out into the world and collect objects of interest for Mr. Locke’s museum. January only sees him on occasion but longs to see him more often.

January is a wonderful character, adventurous, precocious, and obviously gifted in unclear ways at the start of the story. We know that January has the ability to go through “Doors” that lead into other mystical and miraculous places. (This is no spoiler, you know, from the very start.) Also important is a small book/diary called The Thousand Doors -something January finds early on, which proves to be key to the plot.

What is not clear is the nature of these “Doors” - their origin, why they exist, and how you gain entry.

I’m a little concerned about giving away any spoilers because I think it’s important to know “what happens next” when the author wants you to get the most enjoyment out of the book. What I will be able to say is that we follow January as she finds out about her own origins and background and those of these mysterious “Doors.” There is a resolution to the story, and by the end, we get the answers to most of our questions.

Saying that I had mixed reactions to the story. On the one hand, it was incredibly imaginative and unique, and boy, do I give it credit for that. The concept of the Doors and the way they are used in the story is great.

For the most part, the prose is pretty great if you like whimsical, which I do. Simultaneously, it felt like every paragraph had to be particularly clever, and for the reader, it gets a little exhausting. So much so I was tempted to skim a few parts 1/3 of the way through.

However, once I got to the halfway section, I could not put it down, which is high praise.

Examples of overworked writing:

“Word-magic comes at a cost, you see, as power always does. Words draw their vitality from their writers, and thus the strength of the word is limited by the strength of its human vessel. Acts of word-magic leave their workers ill and drained, and the more ambitious their working - the more it defies the warp and weft of the world as it is - the higher the toll. Most everyday sorts of word-workers lack the force of will to risk more than an occasional nosebleed and a day spent in bed, but. More gifted persons must spend years in careful study and training, learning restraint and balance, lest they drain away their very lives.”

Now, this isn’t necessarily bad, and it’s even a bit charming. It just gets a little tedious as a reader to continually read paragraphs like this one after the other.

An example of wonderful prose:

“There was only one remarkable fact about the family: when Adelaide Lee was born, every last living Larson was female. Through poor luck, heart failure, and cowardice, their husbands and sons had left behind a collection of hard-jawed women who looked so similar to one another it was like seeing a single woman’s life spread out in every possible stage.”

I really do recommend this book. This is a talented writer who has written a truly imaginative novel, saying something in this time and age when stories all seem so similar.

I will definitely go out and get her next book.

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 I confess to being an escape reader most of the time. I need to read plots and characters in words made up by somebody else to drown out my own thoughts, usually grim these past few years. Sometimes my escape read has a really great plot or appealing characters; sometimes, it's well written. I rarely find a book that has a superior plot and also exceptional, superior writing. I can think of only three such that I've read in this past year: Diane Setterfield's ONCE UPON A RIVER, Lyndsay Faye's THE PARAGON HOTEL, and Natt och Dag's THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN.

And now we have this debut novel by Alix Harrow. It is everything I look for in fiction. Beautiful writing; clever, unique plot; interesting characters; a world I can lose myself in. You can read this on many levels. If all you want is a thumping good fantasy/adventure, it's here for you. If you want a coming-of-age tale, it's here. If you want a love story, there's some of that also. And if you want an allegorical commentary on society and its biases, injustices, and strictures, look no further.

This is January Schaller's story, and it begins in 1901 in Vermont when she is seven. January, the daughter of a black father, Julian Schaller, and a white mother whose name and existence are unknown to her and us at the beginning, is the ward of wealthy collector Cornelius Locke, her father's employer. Julian is sent off worldwide to find treasures and valuable artifacts for Mr. Locke, while January lives a lonely life, rather like Locke's curious pet, possession, or curiosity as a mixed-race girl.

She is pampered as a rich man's ward, but her life is contained and confined. When she discovers her first magic Door at the age of seven, she enters the threshold of a new world for a brief moment, until she hears Locke calling to her, and she passes out of that world again, but not before picking up a silver coin she will keep hidden.

This is not the kind of behavior Locke prescribes. January is required to behave appropriately until, at the age of 17, she discovers a leather-bound journal, THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS. There's a whole world, or perhaps one should say "worlds," out there just waiting to be discovered and explored if one can only find the Door to enter them. "Because there are ten thousand stories about ten thousand doors, and we know them as well as our names. They lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, Atlantis, and Lemuria, Heaven, and Hell, to all the directions a compass could never take you, to 'elsewhere'".

And "certain words were written by certain people" hold power. This "word magic" can open doors, to effect change, to free and open minds. Is January one of those "certain people"? Perhaps it "isn't healthy for young girls to grow up with their heads full of doors and other worlds."

So January breaks away from her confines and sets out on her quest. To find her father. To learn about her mother. To know things. To be free. To find a place to belong. And we readers go along for the ride.

As I said earlier, you can choose to read this as a rollicking fantasy/adventure, with certain people searching for Doors and new worlds and other more powerful people looking to stop them and close all those Doors, because Doors "overturn order" and "instigate all sorts of trouble and disruptions."

You can also read this as a coming-of-age story about a girl who needs to find out more about her father and mother to understand herself.

Then there's the fantasy's allegorical level with social commentary about racism and classism, about the rich and powerful oppressing the less powerful, about the need for freedom and change, and about the power of the written word in all of this.

But, most of all for me, there was the simple delight of reading an excellently written book. A book I savored and read slowly, quite the change from my usual race to a book's finish line denouement. View all my reviews