Review:
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow
| Publisher: |
Redhook |
| Copyright: |
September 2019 |
| ISBN: |
0-316-42198-7 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
373 |
In 1901, at the age of seven, January found a Door. It was barely more
than a frame in a ruined house in a field in Kentucky, but she wrote a
story about opening it, and then did.
Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door.
It was a magic Door that's why it has a capital D. She opened the
Door.
The Door led to a bluff over the sea and above a city, a place very far
from Kentucky, and she almost stayed, but she came back through the Door
when her guardian, Mr. Locke, called. The adventure cost her a diary,
several lectures, days of being locked in her room, and the remnants of
her strained relationship with her father. When she went back, the frame
of the Door was burned to the ground.
That was the end of Doors for January for some time, and the continuation
of a difficult childhood. She was cared for by her father's employer as a
sort of exotic pet, dutifully attempting to obey, grateful for Mr. Locke's
protection, and convinced that he was occasionally sneaking her presents
through a box in the Pharaoh Room out of some hidden kindness. Her father
appeared rarely, said little, and refused to take her with him. Three
things helped: the grocery boy who smuggled her stories, an intimidating
black woman sent by her father to replace her nurse, and her dog.
Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they
became the very best of friends. She and her dog were inseparable
from that day forward.
I will give you a minor spoiler that I would have preferred to have had,
since it would have saved me some unwarranted worry and some mental
yelling at the author: The above story strains but holds.
January's adventure truly starts the day before her seventeenth birthday,
when she finds a book titled
The Ten Thousand Doors in the box in
the Pharaoh Room.
As you may have guessed from the title,
The Ten Thousand Doors of
January is a portal fantasy, but it's the sort of portal fantasy that is
more concerned with the portal itself than the world on the other side of
it. (Hello to all of you out there who, like me, have vivid memories of
the Wood between the Worlds.) It's a book about traveling and
restlessness and the possibility of escape, about the ability to return
home again, and about the sort of people who want to close those doors
because the possibility of change created by people moving around freely
threatens the world they have carefully constructed.
Structurally, the central part of the book is told by interleaving
chapters of January's tale with chapters from
The Ten Thousand
Doors. That book within a book starts with the framing of a scholarly
treatment but quickly becomes a biography of a woman: Adelaide Lee Larson,
a half-wild farm girl who met her true love at the threshold of a Door and
then spent much of her life looking for him.
I am not a very observant reader for plot details, particularly for books
that I'm enjoying. I read books primarily for the emotional beats and the
story structure, and often miss rather obvious story clues. (I'm hopeless
at guessing the outcomes of mysteries.) Therefore, when I say that there
are many things January is unaware of that are obvious to the reader,
that's saying a lot. Even more clues were apparent when I skimmed the
first chapter again, and a more observant reader would probably have seen
them on the first read. Right down to Mr. Locke's name, Harrow is not
very subtle about the moral shape of this world.
That can make the early chapters of the book frustrating. January is
being emotionally (and later physically) abused by the people who have
power in her life, but she's very deeply trapped by false loyalty and lack
of external context. Winning free of that is much of the story of the
book, and at times it has the unpleasantness of watching someone make
excuses for her abuser. At other times it has the unpleasantness of
watching someone be abused. But this is the place where I thought the
nested story structure worked marvelously. January escapes into the story
of
The Ten Thousand Doors at the worst moments of her life, and the
reader escapes with her. Harrow uses the desire to switch scenes back to
the more adventurous and positive story to construct and reinforce the
emotional structure of the book. For me, it worked extremely well.
It helps that the ending is glorious. The payoff is worth all the
discomfort and tension-building in the first half of the book. Both
The Ten Thousand Doors and the surrounding narrative reach deeply
satisfying conclusions, ones that are entangled but separate in just the
ways that they need to be. January's abilities, actions, and decisions at
the end of the book were just the outcome that I needed but didn't
entirely guess in advance. I could barely put down the last quarter of
this story and loved every moment of the conclusion.
This is the sort of book that can be hard to describe in a review because
its merits don't rest on an original twist or easily-summarized idea. The
elements here are all elements found in other books: portal fantasy, the
importance of story-telling, coming of age, found family, irrepressible
and indomitable characters, and the battle of the primal freedom of travel
and discovery and belief against the structural forces that keep rulers in
place. The merits of this book are in the small details: the way that
January's stories are sparse and rare and sometimes breathtaking, the
handling of tattoos, the construction of other worlds with a few deft
strokes, and the way Harrow embraces the emotional divergence between
January's life and Adelaide's to help the reader synchronize the emotional
structure of their reading experience with January's.
She writes a door of blood and silver. The door opens just for her.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is up against a very strong slate
for both the Nebula and the Hugo this year, and I suspect it may be edged
out by other books, although I wouldn't be unhappy if it won. (It
probably has a better shot at the Nebula than the Hugo.) But I will be
stunned if Harrow doesn't walk away with the
Mythopoeic Award. This seems
like exactly the type of book that award was created for.
This is an excellent book, one of the best I've read so far this year.
Highly recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
The elevent update in the 0.12.* series of 
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (
My late biological maternal grandmother ("Nana"), remarried late in her life to
a long-time friend named Bryce. I was probably an early teenager. He was a nice
guy, and I kept in loose contact with him after my Nana passed away.
After my Nana passed away, he moved out of the retirement home he'd been living
in with my Nana, and in with one of his sons. Sometime before I moved back to
Australia, in ailing physical health, he moved from his son's place into 
Yesterday, the first milestone of the Havana developement branch of
Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download.
This means the first quarter of the OpenStack Havana development has
passed!
New features
Ten blueprints have been implemented as you can see on the
thanks to my vacations starting I had a bit more time this week for working
on RC bugs. here's the usual list; again: thanks to all the restless
patch providers!
Two weeks ago, 
There was a big flood at Anna's today. I heard it was going down so I went
ahead with my planned visit. In the field across the road, the creek was
swollen to a lake at least 200 feet wide. At the ford, the water was only
out of the banks of the creek about 30 feet on each side, and I could even
see the bridge, but getting to it would have involved swimming.
I went down the road half a mile, past the confluence of the two creeks,
where it was very backed up (and nearly up to the road), and explored
upstream to where the creek was back within its banks, but still several
feet high. Found a tree down and had a thrilling trip over. Then I had to
bushwack all the way back upstream to Anna's. The flood reached right up to
the hillsides in most places, so lots of scrambling around hills.
Finally, about an hour after arriving, I got in. With feet completly dry.
Then we went around surveying for a couple hours -- when better to survey
a near-swamp than when it's in flood. My dry feet -- not dry anymore.
I kinda dreaded getting back out, since the waters were not going down much
more. 2/3 of the way out, I hurt my knee slightly, and getting back across
the deadfall was even more tricky. Lucy the dog walked across a more
precarious tree at the same time, like it was nothing.
Well, that was an adventure! Some day I want to see where this creek goes
underground and supposedly passes under the Clinch river to emerge at
Sinking spring.
That's how I'm passing this week.
What? No, I'm not getting married. It just feels like my body isn't
quite sure whether it wants to be sick or not.
On monday, I got down with influenza, mostly in the stomach area. Not
only does that hurt and feel awfully bad, it also involves your
yesterday's lunch reversing direction halfway through the digestive
system, and finding the wrong way out. Some people call that
puking. Being restless, doing nothing, I tried to do some work for
Debian.
My lack of posts lately left Planet readers without yet another yay,
GNOME 2.20 released post. I'm sure nobody missed it. However, I can report
what's going on in Debian regarding its packaging.
The executive summary is: the GNOME team rocks, and having much of GNOME
2.20 available in sid on the very same day it was officially announced was
possible thanks to the incredible work done by lool, Np237, slomo and other
restless team members, who spent the summer tracking GNOME 2.19 releases and
packaging them in experimental.
To get a better view on what's left to do, you can use the