The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow starts by introducing us to January Scaller, a young girl whose father frequently travels and leaves her in the custody of his employer, Mr. Locke, a collector of interesting artifacts. But she finds a strange book and soon she finds out that her own identity is as much of a mystery as to where all of Mr. Locke's trinkets come from.

In general, I liked this book. I liked the strong female characters - January, Ade, and Jane are my new favorites. I liked the love stories in this book - they felt real and magical in the real sense of how it goes when you meet someone and something clicks. I liked Bad, the dog who comes to the rescue over and over again, as any good canine companion would. l liked the historical fiction aspect of this fantasy novel, in which a black girl is faced with discrimination as she tries to maneuver through this world. I liked so much. 

But it's not a perfect book. The motivations of the very evil villains are still not entirely clear to me. There's a villain who happens to be a vampire and that storyline is out of place and strange. There's also a part in which January is committed to a mental health asylum when she's sane and it's a trope that I don't care for because it's so real and how do you prove you're sane when people say you're not and I legit freak out when this happens in books. Ahem. Maybe you don't need to know that much about my fears.

It's a good book. I'm counting on it to turn around my bad book streak. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Samuel Zappia was my only nonfictional friend...(page 9)

When I was young, I really felt like the characters in books were my best friends, so this really resonated with me.

...what is written is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy...all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. (page 53)

This sort of made me chuckle. Move over Black Lives Matter, All Words Matter.

None of this marked the Larsons apart from any of their neighbors. It seems unlikely that any biographer or chronicler or even a local newspaperman has ever written their names in print before now. The interviews conducted for this study were stilted, suspicious affairs, akin to interrogating starlings or white-tailed deer. (page 56) 

As always, I feel like I need to identify fun animal-related similes.

The townspeople - who weren't really townspeople at all, but more a collection of feral persons who lived on farms just as isolated and distant as the Larson family's, who congregated for auctions, funerals, and God - shuffled into the pews with the same dulled expression they wore every week. (page 63-64)

I like this as a way to describe rural life. It seems appropriate.

"No, thank you," I said. He blinked with the stunned expression of a man who knew the word no existed by had never actually met in the flesh. (page 82)

Ha. Harrow's observations about men are hilarious to me.

...words in that world can sometimes rise from their ink-and-cotton cradles and reshape the nature of reality. Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world. (page 134)

This book is about the love of words, the love of books, the love of reading. I think this passage demonstrates the themes more than any other.

Yule was stuffed with the kind of unblemished confidence that belongs only to the very young, who have never truly known the bitterness of failure, or felt the years of their lives trickling away from them like water from cupped palms. It seemed to him that his success was inevitable. (page 146)

This reminded me of one of the lines I noted in Writers & Lovers about how all the men the narrator knew felt that greatness was their destiny. It seems crazy that these ideas came up in books I read two weeks apart.

"They always end up alone in the stories - witches, I mean - living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and men are mostly cowards." (page 250)

More of Harrow's feelings toward men coming off the page.

Things I looked up:

Grammalogie (page 51) - the study of signs or symbols representing words

Glottologie (page 51) - linguistics

Great Algiers Fire of 1895 (page 101) - In October 1895, a fire broke out in New Orleans on Morgan Street. This blaze destroyed hundreds of homes.

Toussain Louverture's rebellion (page 104) - Louverture was born into slavery, but became a Haitian revolutionary leader. Some argue he led the most successful slave revolt in world history and was a crucial figure in the downfall of European colonialism. 

Line that made me laugh:

"Guests, Sol?" She said the word guests the way you might say fleas or influenza. (page 267)

Introverts unite, right?

This word again!

oubliette (page 132) - How does this come up again within a month? It is that crazy phenomenon when you learn a word and then just see it everywhere, isn't it?