5/5 stars (yay!)
There was something profoundly sad about closing this book when I finished it, because I knew with certainty that I will never be able to find the same wonderful type of magic that is in these pages in any other book.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is slow paced. A considerable portion is devoted to a book inside the book, telling the story of other people and their experience with Doors and with other worlds. But the strong and compelling prose pulls you in from the very first sentence and doesn't let you go. Not once in all 385 pages of this book was I anything less than fascinated, excited, and fully engaged. There are not enough words to explain how much I loved this book and this story and this world, because nothing I say will be as beautiful as exquisite or delightful as the book itself.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is completely and truly unlike any book I have ever read. It's so many things, beautifully and perfectly woven together. It's an aching love letters to stories and the worlds they open up to us. It's a harsh criticism of racism, sexism, classism, and the domination of power by rich white men. It's an ode to true love, it's a celebration of friendship, it's a door to new and fantastic worlds. But the brilliance of this book is that I am almost convinced that these aren't really new worlds, but rather very old ones that are hovering just at the edges of our own.
January Scaller is a self-described "in-between girl," a woman of color in white, upper class American society in the early 1900s. She is protected in the moneyed shadow of Mr. Locke, her father's rich employer. January is docile, charming, and obedient: Mr. Locke's "good girl." But underneath that compliance is a fire burning deep inside January, a fire that is burning for freedom, for adventure, for justice and for power. And eventually that fire explodes.
“Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”
“The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.”
I loved January. She was the kind of person that I could see myself being friends with. She was smart and funny, brave and loyal. She wasn't perfect - she was naive and inexperienced - but she was real and unique and honest.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is beautifully written and clearly thoroughly researched. Early 1900s America is palpable, an absorbing, detailed, and convincing world. And the fantasy worlds! They were all so incredibly imaginative and real-seeming and wonderful!
January's journey of growing up, of finding herself, of becoming an adventurer, of finding her family, and of seizing the power of words to become more than her world told her she could be, was utterly amazing, magical, and emotional. January is who every reader wishes themselves to be: someone who can really follow a story into their world, who can find Doors and walk through them and find themselves in a fantastical place. And by reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January, you can. You can experience the spectacular, and think that just maybe you will find a Door yourself.
“I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.”
5/5 stars
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