January’s father is one of these employees. Like Hearst he dispatches employees all over the world to bring back archeological treasures for his own vast, private museum. January is a mixed-race girl being raised on the luxurious Vermont estate of the wealthy William Cornelius Locke, an early 20th-century robber baron in the mold of J.P. The ten thousand doors of the title are actual portals to other realities, scattered all over the globe, one of which is discovered by the main narrator, January Scaller, when she is just seven years old. Essentially, Harrow combines the conventions of portal fantasy with a version of parallel-worlds SF, but both are subsumed to her main concern, which is the liberating potential of words and stories. Harrow’s remarkable first novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but for me to explain further might compromise some of the readerly pleasures of unfolding Harrow’s multilayered, origami-like narrative. The idea of locking out historical change in order to preserve a particular version of male hegemony is an important theme in Alix E. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E.
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