Mostly Murders

I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a strange and beautiful book. It is the story of a young woman slowly uncovering an odd family history, it is a story of multiple worlds connected by portals in the shape of doors, and it is a story of the power of words and stories. It is also a story of love, of wanderlust, of discovery and of escape.

It is a story of outcasts and outsiders trying to carve out an existence in the shadows of rich white men. It is a scholarly examination of the fantastical and impossible. It is a story of true love burning with the brightness of a thousand suns, and it is a gothic tale of insanity, control and manipulation.

But most of all, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a story about the love of stories, about the desire for adventure shaped by a profound unhappiness with one’s current situation, and the burning desire to escape reality that only a truly engaging story can provide. It is a story for all the girls who have been told to be quiet and obedient, and for anyone who has been made to feel like they didn’t belong in their own world because of their skin colour, heritage or background.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is not an easy read. And it is not a fun, fantastical magical journey to thousands of exciting worlds, or a novel devoid of politics and social critique. It is, for a big part of the book, a novel with two different storylines that only slowly come together, and it is a story of our own world seen through the lens of the suffering of women and people of colour in early 1900s America.

It is raw and tough and demanding of its reader, so enter at your own risk, because every story is a portal, and there is no telling what you will find on the other side, and how what you find will shape you once you return to your own world.

Fantasy – Magical Realism – Historical fiction