The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

 

The Ten Thousand Doors of January 

by Alix E. Harrow

I’m not even sure where to start with this book — it’s so big and full of story.

I suppose we should start with January, so named by her mother for the god Janus, who looks both forward and backward.

“You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark.”

When the story opens, she seems like a normal little girl, though out of place in this time period and circumstance.

“I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.”

January lives in a manor house with a rich man for a guardian while her father searches the world for artifacts for him. It’s a bit sad, but there is so much more to the story, and as it unfolds, we are taking on a very rich and full journey.

“When I was seven, I found a Door . . . at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

There may not be ten thousand doors in this story, but there are a great many. There are also a great many misperceptions and the author is masterful in painting rich pictures that do not give us more information than we need to know at that point in the plot. The writing is beautiful in the pictures it presents and the words chosen.

January has a governess, Miss Wilda who is a bit stodgy, and a friend from the local grocer’s, Samuel Zappia, though she isn’t supposed to spend time associating with him. He still manages to slip her stories to read. He also presents her with her best friend, a puppy she names Sinbad. This dog is just a dog in this novel, but also all of the best things a dog can be, a best friend and protector.

January finds a book in a chest, which she presumes was left there for her by her guardian, which sets her on a journey as it tells the story of Miss Adelaide Lee Larson and her explorations through Doors.

“I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.”

As I said, there are many Doors in this story, and just as you think you have a handle on what is happening, you step through a new one into something that builds a new story onto the one you are reading.

“…there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories.”

A fantastical journey I hope you will take.