For years, January was as molten glass in Locke’s hands, to be spun into the (dutiful, docile, " un-temerarious") shape he liked. January Scaller grew up uneasily lodged with the immensely wealthy Cornelius Locke, her childhood a half-painted picture without her father in it while he disappeared for days, months, to buy off with Locke’s gold coins marvels and oddities from all around the world. But that isn’t the true beginning of the story. The rush of turning a page and a story beginning. The Ten Thousand Doors of January starts, as great tales often do, with a book. When one enters a door, one must be brave enough to see the other side. Even the morning’s clarity couldn’t snatch that away. The sensible part of me informed me, patiently, that none of it had any more bearing on real life than a dream, yet in the surreal fuzziness of the night, I felt-on a bone-deep, irrational level-the possibility that I might turn a key, open a door and unlock the mysteries of the world. It seemed hardly credible when I finished reading that I couldn’t follow the words back to a world where this wasn’t mere fiction. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is almost less a novel than an experience: never have I felt more like I was part of things, moved by the same current, like my soul had disconnected from my body and drifted among fictional souls in a mist somewhere between fantasy and reality. I felt that to speak of this book would be to contain what it did to me, to diminish it somehow.
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