4/5 stars
“Be something every minute of every day, be sad, be cold, be warm, be hungry, be full, be ragged or well dressed, be truthful, be a liar and a sinner, only be something every blessed minute. Make art, make the most beautiful art you can, draw everything you see, everything you feel. And when you sleep, dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is lost.”
Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All (can we just appreciate that title for a second?) is an exceptional story. Laura Ruby takes what could have been a relatively simple (but still good!) narrative about a girl trying to survive during the Great Depression and WWII, and turns it into a multi-layered, ghost-filled, magical realism story about the parallels between two girls and two wars, about women and feminism and girls' place in the world, and about injustice of all kinds.
Because this story about Frankie, a sort-of orphan who's been kicked to the curb, is narrated by a ghost. The ghost of a girl named Pearl who lived through another war, WWI, and whose story echos Frankie's. The themes from Frankie's story of love, loss, family, and survival are heightened by the parallels of her story in Pearl's. We see how similar girls in a similar time can have stories that are mirrored to each other, but diverge so harshly for Frankie to continue to survive and Pearl to be a ghost.
Frankie's story is pretty straightforward, but I absolutely adored her and was deeply invested in what would happen to this strong, battered, confident girl. Pearl's present is her ghost life of following Frankie around (she feels drawn to her, and a connection to her, because of their mirrored lives), and meeting other ghosts, including my favorite character, Marguerite, a sad and snappy ghost girl. Pearl's past is peeled back ever so slowly, layer by layer, and each new piece of the puzzle is a revelation to both us and Pearl, as she faces her repressed memories of her life and death.
Often in books that have more than one main storyline, I find myself preferring one of them and just waiting around during the other to get back to the better one. Not so in Thirteen Doorways! I was truly equally invested in Frankie and Pearl's stories and was fully in the moment during both of their storylines. Their narratives are so intwined, especially with Pearl narrating Frankie's story, that it didn't even feel like there were split narratives or separate storylines. There was just Frankie & Pearl.
This is also partly due to Laura Ruby's writing, which is so so good. She spins out beautiful sentences that just make you want to keep reading.
A few of the supporting characters in Frankie's story I do wish had been a little more fleshed out, like her sister and her father, but this wasn't a make or break thing, and the interesting main characters made up for it!
“It doesn’t matter which door you open, she said. Three or ten or thirteen doorways, there are wolves behind them all.”
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