Hugos 2020: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Trade paperback, 394 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)
Acquired and read June 2020

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

I felt like this riff on portal fantasies had an interesting idea but never really kicked into gear. I've been focusing a lot in my Hugo reading comments over the past few years on a subgenre forming around Ancillary Justice, but the "self-aware portal fantasy" is another one that clearly has a strong presence, in things like McGuire's "Wayward Children" sequence (as well as Middlegame to an extent), Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus, and Brennan's In Other Lands. These are portal fantasies written by and for adults who were children who grew up consuming portal fantasies. Harrow sets her novel at the time of some of the earliest ones (the bulk of the action is set in 1911), and thinks about this question: if our world is full of portals to other worlds, what's coming in to our world?

The problem I had is that the resulting novel is pretty mundane. The book talks about the promise of the portal, the idea that going through a door can take you to this amazing world, and as someone who grew up on Oz and Narnia (and started my own novel about being swept away to Oz when in middle school), I empathize with that feeling. But the novel neverrnever makes you feel it. We barely glimpse any other worlds, and the ones we do... aren't very interesting, to be honest. Harrow talks about that sense of magic you get when crossing over the threshold to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the interview in the back of my edition, but I never felt that here.

There was flashes where I was intrigued or drawn in. January is a good protagonist, her childhood is depicted evocatively, the way the doors worked was neat, and there are a couple harrowing (heh) sequences. The prose is good, though it occasionally drifts into an overly precious Seanan McGuireesque mode. The reveal of the big bad, though, was annoying, because multiple characters are surprised by who it is and what his plan is, even though there's literally no other rational interpretation of events. If I was supposed to be misdirected as a reader, the book failed miserably; if I was supposed to know what was going on even as the characters were misdirected, the book made it a misery to read about. The idea of this book is a lot more interesting than the actuality of it.