“Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt. You can’t fear the in-between.”

I had very high hopes for The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. I had seen rave reviews of it online from authors I highly respected. It appeared to be a Girls Underground story that not only featured a titular girl, but relied heavily on magical portals (my favorite kind of portals!). I was hoping not to be disappointed, as I have been a few times recently with GU books that had all the right elements in theory, but just didn’t possess that spark of Trueness, nor the facility with language that can stop you flat in your tracks to savor a sentence fully before resuming the journey. Fortunately, this book delivered just what I was looking for (and more, since it turned out to also touch upon my favorite theme, the Power of Story… in this case, the power of words themselves to change reality). I don’t think I’ve felt so connected to a book profiled here since my beloved The Hazel Wood (the upcoming sequel of which is a burning brand on the horizon for me!)

“….all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth.”

January Scaller was 7 years old (just like Alice) when she first opened a Door to another world – but she closed it without venturing further, and as she grew older, she tried to be a proper young woman with no time for magic. But magic is persistent. Now 17 – her mother dead, her father away most of the year searching for relics in service to the man who cares for her – she discovers not only that the Door was real, but that there are many Doors to many worlds, and that she seems to have a special power to open them (as well as other accomplishing other miraculous feats) by writing it as Story. When her father disappears – feared dead – she embarks on a quest to find him, armed only with a curious book that seems to tell the story not only of the Doors, but of something much closer to home. She acquires companions in human and canine form, and Adversaries seem to abound until the greatest foe is eventually revealed.

“Companions. See the curve of that C like a pair of outstretched arms? It implied the sort of friends who might slay dragons or go on hopeless quests or swear blood oaths at midnight.”

Escaping an asylum and pursued by a dangerous cabal with dark intentions, she finds a town of outcasts where she might just fit in…. if her presence doesn’t destroy them first. With no place safe, she desperately searches for the answers to the mystery of her own beginnings, returning at last to that very first Door. After a devastating betrayal, her true Adversary is revealed, and attempts to seduce her to his cause, but in the end, all she wants is to go home – once she can find out where that is, and how to get there. After completing her quest and defeating her Adversary, she finds she has a new mission that is bigger than any of them – and the power and strength to complete it.

“But perhaps–if I were brave and temerarious and very foolish–if I listened to the flat, fearless voice in my heart, so familiar and strange–I could rescue both of us.”