The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Overwrought Reading of an Overwritten Story The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019) by Alix E. Harrow has a promising premise, an ambitious attempt at a UFT (Unified Fantasy Theory): all the myths, legends, fairy tales and so on (including all their magical artifacts and supernatural beings, as well as much of the change, revolution, and evolution in history) derive from portals between worlds. Ten thousand such “Doors” (ten thousand representing an infinite number) exist connecting countless worlds, and “leakage” happens when inhabitants pass between worlds and bring or carry away artifacts and ideas and the like. Seventeen-year-old January Scaller is telling her story in 1911, starting with when she was a “temerarious” and imaginative seven-year-old girl of color and traveled in 1901 from Vermont to Kentucky with the wealthy white collector Mr. Locke. She left their hotel, wandered into a field, and found a blue Door, through which she briefly entered another world with an exotic and beautiful island city. Mr. Locke, her guardian while her father Julian is off looking for exotic artifacts, burned the blue Door and set about educating all such “fanciful nonsense” out of her and training her up to be a “good girl.” Increasingly unhappy, January’s life changed again when as a teenager she found a book called The Ten Thousand Doors of January in Mr. Locke’s house and discovered that it was written by her father about, at first, a girl from Kentucky called Adelaide “Ade” Lee Larson, and later about his own past and January’s mother and how they came to know Mr. Locke and so on and so forth. Chapters from his book read by January alternate with chapters of January telling her own story. Just what January’s father is doing for Mr. Locke and just what Mr. Locke’s creepy New England Archeological Society is up to are mysteries that January will find out about as she struggles to grow up and find her own voice and purpose. The writing by Harrow is often fine, with potent lines and similes describing characters and feelings and Doors and so on. The beginning is great: “When I was seven I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing.” There are many other impressive similes, like “as if an invisible housewife was tugging at the corners of reality,” and “Both Bad and Sammy looked like they had died and been reanimated by a sorcerer of questionable skill.” She has a sense of humor, like “Good manners are advisable when dealing with strangers or ghosts.” The story’s heart is in the right place, criticizing gender and racial and class discrimination and promoting imagination, fantasy, and change. (It makes a couple nods to different sexualities while keeping the protagonist safely heterosexual.) Harrow writes pointed lines like, “You don't know how fragile your name is until you watch a rich man drag it away like signing a bank loan.” The book has other virtues, like being a compact stand-alone novel instead of a first doorstopper volume in a series. However, the novel also has numerous problems… One is that despite early 20th-century bêtes noirs of racism, sexism, and classism and references to early 20th-century fiction like Oz, White Fang, and Tom Swift, the story doesn’t FEEL like America circa 1910, unlike, say, The Golem and the Jinni (2013) by Helene Wecker. January talks like a contemporary girl (e.g., “The hell I will”). Why did Harrow set it a hundred+ years ago and not, say, now? To do race and gender commentary without criticizing contemporary American culture? Worse problems involve January being incredibly and unbelievably obtuse at key moments, so Harrow can make the plot go. She has January not realize important things like the identities and relationship to her of the young lovers in her father’s book and the identity of the rich white man who made an offer to Ade’s family etc. long after the reader has figured them out, such that when January finally has a moment of revelation, her surprise feels absurd. At one point, January knows an enemy has gotten the drop on her via a magical feather that bestows invisibility on the bearer, but when she gets the guy at her mercy, she only takes his magical compass. It seems like Harrow wanted January to be visible for the ensuing climactic showdown without thinking of a more believable way to make that happen. Furthermore, when you give a character a powerful ability like, say, being able to write anything she wants to change the world (short of bringing back the dead), you must then think of good reasons for her not to use that ability when she obviously could but doesn’t. Such mood breaking plot contrivances don’t only involve January. Jane has been hunting forest ogres in another world for 22 years or so and is super capable and alert, but at one point Harrow has her stay sleeping while January takes her heavy pistol from her waist and then has her not notice that the pistol is missing while pursuing a villain until she finally tries to draw it, all so Jane can be wounded for the plot. Exacerbating the unbelievable obtuseness of her characters is Harrow’s tendency to overwrite. She almost never meets a situation without thinking up a cool simile or metaphor to describe it, as with voices: “like a mummy clearing its throat of grave dust,” “like a disused hinge,” “as if he’d replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows,” etc. Some of her metaphors feel strained, like “My thoughts were a flock of drunk birds ricocheting between despair… and a childish bubbling excitement.” Corny or absurd lines occur, like “Hearts aren't chess boards, and they don't play by the rules.” For dramatic effect, she starts overusing the rhetorical strategy of structural repetition, e.g., “I felt... felt... felt...” and “Away from... away from... away from...” The irritating effect of all that overwriting is exacerbated by the reader, January Lavoi, whose over-emoting, lengthening of vowels, and strenuously different voices (like January’s little girl voice) begin irritating the ears. The two overdone forces--Harrow’s writing and Lavoi’s reading--make each other seem ever more overwrought, until the whole thing is hard to continue listening to, especially when January is so often unconvincingly obtuse. Thus, this ambitious fantasy novel irritated more than impressed, and I felt relieved to finish the audiobook. View all my reviews
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