If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some point there is always a doorway.
Alix E. Harrow is up for two Hugo Awards this year, one for the lovely short story “Do Not Look Back, My Lion” and one for The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a novel that follows the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children and Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, and so many other books where a new world with its own magic and its own dangers is waiting for anyone who can find the right door.
The story starts in the early 1900’s when the lonely semi-adopted daughter of a wealthy collector finds and then loses an impossible door, and later finds a mysterious book titled THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS. The book tells two intertwined tales of people searching for years, finding hundreds of hidden doors and the worlds behind them, and the many adventures they have until they can each find their door.
Meanwhile, someone out there is also finding the doors. And then closing them.
So many elements of this book are things that I love in all books. The story-within-a-story is one. I don’t know why, but having the main plot come to a halt so someone can say any variation of “Here’s how it happened…” is just irresistible to me. Having a young girl who adores stories of all kinds (she’s referred to at one point as Little Miss Leave Me Alone I’m Reading, and I couldn’t possibly identify with that more) find a book that smells of distant worlds and unfurls a tale of love and loss and an infinite number of secret portals to other places? Sheer perfection.
This one smelled unlike any book I’d ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes beneath palm fronds.
It’s even better if the story-within-a-story features a random series of fascinating details, like the young lady named Ade experiences in her quest for the right door. Ice worlds, forest worlds, night worlds, most of the times just tantalizing glimpses and offhand comments, occasionally just a period of time where Ade disappears and then strolls back days or weeks later with a fur coat and frostbite, or a cloak of black feathers, or a new smile. The author ties the idea of these worlds into an overarching theory for all fantasy stories and every magical item that’s inexplicably appeared to drive the plot (magic lamps and magic mirrors and golden fleeces and cats that don’t seem to acknowledge locked rooms or barriers.)
And it’s all wrapped around a love story. A couple of love stories, actually, ones that started in childhood and stretched across smuggled books and puppies, tattoos of words that wrap around arms, and a boat on a mountaintop.
He considered, briefly and foolishly, simply telling the truth: that he sought to follow the skittering ant-trails of the worlds into other worlds, to find a burnt-orange field lit with fireflies, to find a girl the color of wheat and milk.
As the reader of the mysterious book and the narrator of the rest of the action, we see everything through the eyes of January Scaller, a young girl who in her own way is caught in between worlds. Her explorer father is always away, “locating” (stealing) treasures for the wealthy Mr. Locke, January’s guardian. January and her father are dark-skinned, and the author has a lot to say about all the ways that people can be made to feel like they don’t belong, and that particular kind of poisonous feeling that comes from being told they should be grateful that there’s someone with money who’s willing to smooth things over for them. The period in history that the story takes place in means that January is gently (and relentlessly) expected to be a good girl, know her place, do what she’s told, and show that none of the money and effort that’s been spent on her was a waste.
Sometimes I was so lonely I thought I might wither into ash and drift away on the next errant breeze.
Sometimes I felt like an item in Mr. Locke’s collection labeled January Scaller, 57 inches, bronze; purpose unknown.
It’s no wonder that January retreats into adventure serials and pulp fantasy novels, and later THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS, especially when she starts to discover the existence of the doors and a possible real escape, right around the same time she discovers how much control people with a staggering amount of money have.
…the rules were made by Lockes and Havemeyers, by wealthy men in private smoking rooms who pulled the world’s riches to themselves like well-dressed spiders in the center of a golden web.
With her imposing friend Jane and her childhood companion Samuel and her loyal dog Bad, January often feels like she’s stepped inside one of the adventure novels she used to read. But it’s a story with a lot of real peril, shocking betrayal, and some surprisingly bad-ass things January is capable of with a sharp object and rage. 
There were some plot twists that smacked me upside the head with how much I wasn’t expecting them, even though the author had neatly set everything up several chapters ahead. (Seriously, I have a note at one point that just says “Storylines colliding” and then later another note “STORYLINES COLLIDING”.)
Oddly enough, the parts of the story that hurt the most are the moments of real beauty. As much as they feel like paradise, they’re still tinged with sadness, since by its very nature you know that it wouldn’t even be a story (or not one that everyone would want to read) if it was happily-ever-after from start to finish.