But even more than the beautiful language, the plot, the characters, and the skill with which the author brings the intersecting storylines to an ending that is at once healing and fraught with pain, what I relished most about this book, and what I will remember most about it, is the way the author succeeds in giving the desperate earnestness of her storytelling the quality of a memory. The prose is addictive, saturated with so much ache and yearning. Harrow has written a jewel of a novel that grips readers from the opening sentence.

It is my hope that this story is your thread, and at the end of it you find a door. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. My long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. Until one day, when she stumbles upon a book, and she is suddenly lost and found and wandering, all at once. The more January's father became absent, the more what used to be fluent between them became difficult to translate. Now consumed by a sense of dreary imprisonment within Locke’s sprawling mansion and suffering an undimmed longing for an absentee father, January became lonelier. For years, January was as molten glass in Locke’s hands, to be spun into the (dutiful, docile, ' un-temerarious') shape he liked. January Scaller grew up uneasily lodged with the immensely wealthy Cornelius Locke, her childhood a half-painted picture without her father in it while he disappeared for days, months, to buy off with Locke’s gold coins marvels and oddities from all around the world. But that isn’t the true beginning of the story. The rush of turning a page and a story beginning. The Ten Thousand Doors of January starts, as great tales often do, with a book.

When one enters a door, one must be brave enough to see the other side. Even the morning’s clarity couldn’t snatch that away. The sensible part of me informed me, patiently, that none of it had any more bearing on real life than a dream, yet in the surreal fuzziness of the night, I felt-on a bone-deep, irrational level-the possibility that I might turn a key, open a door and unlock the mysteries of the world. It seemed hardly credible when I finished reading that I couldn’t follow the words back to a world where this wasn’t mere fiction. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is almost less a novel than an experience: never have I felt more like I was part of things, moved by the same current, like my soul had disconnected from my body and drifted among fictional souls in a mist somewhere between fantasy and reality. I felt that to speak of this book would be to contain what it did to me, to diminish it somehow.

The 10000 doors of january review