"The Ten Thousand Doors of January"

[fiefoe]

Another popular fantasy novel that I found somewhat lacking. Alix E. Harrow does write prettily, but the central theme seems too obvious. Or maybe the outsider heroine thing is getting old? Or maybe the overweening villian/surrogate father isn't menacing enough? Or maybe the love-at-first-sight romance doesn't stir me anymore? The estranged father/daughter relationship is perhaps the most interesting bit.

• “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”
• Morgan had recently become the richest man in the entire history of the world; Queen Victoria had finally expired and left her vast empire to her kingly-looking son; those unruly Boxers had been subdued in China; and Cuba had been tucked neatly beneath America’s civilized wing. Reason and rationality reigned supreme, and there was no room for magic or mystery.
• I escaped outdoors (see how that word slips into even the most mundane of stories? Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges).
• His expression as he surveyed me made me think of old-timey illustrations of God: severely paternal, bestowing the kind of love that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy.
• I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.
• After that, Miss Wilda seemed to fade from our lives like newsprint left out in the sun. She simply couldn’t compete with Bad, who grew at an alarming pace.
• Mr. Locke looked as he always did: squarish and neat, seeming to reject the aging process as a waste of valuable time.
• Mr. Locke’s jaw worked backward and forward, as if his next words required chewing to soften them.
• (It seems to me that Lee Larson’s life was more defined by impulsivity and cowardice than an adventurous spirit, but a daughter must find what value she can in her father. Especially if he is absent.)
• If we were to draw her childhood wanderings on a map, represent her discoveries and destinations in topographic form and trace her winding way through them, we would see her as a girl solving a maze from the center outward, a Minotaur working her way free.
• her face had a freckled squareness that sidestepped beauty and landed somewhere nearer to handsome.
• But from this moment forward Ade’s story grows grander, stranger, and wilder. She steps into fable and folktale, sideways and unseen, slipping through the fissures of recorded history the way smoke rises through dense canopy. No scholar, no matter how clever or meticulous, can map smoke and myth onto the page.
• It has been this scholar’s experience that stories slide up and down rivers alongside boats, trailing like silver mermaids in their wake, and the tale of the boo hag was probably swimming among them in those days.
• She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria in Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.
• when he saw me standing on the staircase. “Ah. Your prize malcontent, Cornelius.” Havemeyer’s smile
• I wondered dispassionately if they’d always been there, lurking just out of sight and whispering their fears to me. If behind every good girl lurked a good threat.
• It’s easy to hate people in books. I’m a reader, too, and I know how characters can turn into Villains at the drop of an authorial hat (those capital Vs like dagger points or sharpened teeth). It just isn’t like that in real life. Mr. Locke was still Mr. Locke—
• There are worlds where the continents are carried on the backs of vast turtles swimming through freshwater oceans, where snakes speak riddles, where the lines between the dead and living are blurred to insignificance. I have seen villages where fire itself had been tamed, and followed at men’s heels like an obedient hound, and cities with glass spires so high they gathered clouds around their spiral points.
• Authors introducing new characters often describe their features and dress first; when introducing a world, it seems polite to begin with its geography.
• Except that Ade had grown up with the harsh boundaries of her life always close at hand and had long since set her will against them; poor, charmed Yule had simply never known such rules existed before that day.
• You may picture the two of them—Ade waiting in the deepening night of the overgrown field with hope guttering like an overspent candle in her chest, Yule perched on the hilltop with his skinny arms held around his knees—almost like figures on either side of a mirror. Except instead of cool glass between them it was the vastness between worlds.
• Yule Ian felt a tremor in his breastbone, as if there were a red thread tied around it and someone had just yanked the other end. He considered, briefly and foolishly, simply telling the truth: that he sought to follow the skittering ant-trails of words into other worlds, to find a burnt-orange field lit with fireflies, to find a girl the color of wheat and milk.
• Dr. Palmer himself was aging, aloof, with tiny half-glasses that perched on the end of his nose like a well-mannered wire bird.
• You people are always trying to invent reasons for things. Monsters only come for bad children, for loose women, for impious men. The truth is that the powerful come for the weak, whenever and wherever they like. Always have, always will.”
• This is the mad Midas touch of true love, which transforms everything it touches to gold. <> Winter crept over Nin stealthily, like a great white cat made of chill mists and sharp-edged winds.
• (This was the true violence Mr. Locke had done to me. You don’t really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan.)
• “I’ve left a trail of faces just like that behind me in three dozen worlds. It’s good for ’em. Trying to explain things that can’t be explained is how you get stories and fairy tales, I figure.”
• But I’m running out of time. Your face is my hourglass: each time I return to Locke House it’s as if I’ve been gone for decades rather than weeks. Entire lifetimes have bloomed and faded for you, months of secret trials and triumphs that have subtly molded your features into someone I hardly recognize.
• Your features so plainly and painfully her own, but your spirit tightly laced beneath good manners and the invisible burden of unbelonging. She had dreamed for you a different life, one profoundly and perilously free, unbounded, every door standing open before you.
• I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.
• Already I imagine I see the effects of their absence in this world: a subtle stagnation, a staleness, like a house that has been left shut up all summer. There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change.
• still fail to write a single word because I’ve become trapped in the mirrored halls of my own memory and cannot escape (the nautilus-curve of your mother’s body around yours;
• Second, because they are each precious and painful to me in some secret way I can’t explain, and I’m not ready to show them to anyone else yet. I want to hold them for a while in the quiet undercurrents of myself, until their edges are worn smooth as river stones.
• The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.
• I saw the knowing arrive, wonderful and terrible. In my memory she has two entirely different faces at once, like the god she named me for: On one face is riotous joy, blazing at me like the sun itself. On the other is deepest mourning, the keening, marrow-deep ache of someone who has looked for something too long and found it too late. She reached her hand toward me, and I saw her mouth move. Jan-u-ary.
• a stack of cotton pages lying in wait, so clean and perfect that every word is a sin, a footstep in fresh-fallen snow.
• Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years.
• Books are Doors and I wanted out.
• My father—who is a true scholar and not just a young lady with an ink pen and a series of things she has to say—puts it much better: “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.
• True love is not stagnant; it is in fact a door, through which all kinds of miraculous and dangerous things may enter.