"If you're some stranger who stumbled over this book by chance – perhaps rotting in some foreign garbage pile or locked in a dusty travelling trunk or published by some small, misguided press and shelved mistakenly under Fiction – I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. 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."

There are two kinds of people in this world; those that say they will only believe something once they see it, and those that believe in anything, because not seeing does not mean it doesn’t exist. I am the latter of the two, and if you are as well then you will fall in love with every word, every letter, every period of this book. And, if you’re like me at all, The Ten Thousand Doors of January will light a spark in the childish part of your soul that never quite stopped believing in magic. I feel like I have been waiting for this book for my whole life. January’s story is exactly what I always dreamed would happen to me, and a small (but growing) part of me still hopes it will.

So what’s going on here?
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a historical fiction portal fantasy set in early 1900s Vermont (and also the 6900s in the Written). It follows January Scaller, an in-between girl growing up in the estate of a wealthy collector of rare items that her father travels the globe to collect. January’s life is one of waiting; waiting for her father to come home, waiting to have her own adventure, waiting to be free. She feels she is doomed to a life of quiet nothingness, until one day she discovers a book that talks about Doors to other worlds, and realizes the Door she found as a seven year old child was real. And if that one is real, then maybe there are others. However, January is not the only one searching for Doors, and it is a race against time to find hers before the villains of her story destroy it.

What I loved
Everything. Just everything, truly. I genuinely don’t think words could ever properly express what this book has done to my soul. I feel alive again, like I’ve found the childish wonder that I had mostly left behind years ago. It brought back the part of me that had me scrolling to the bottom of the Goodreads page for this book with the hope that I might see “non-fiction” stamped along the bottom with the genres. This book has made me think about magic and all the wild, whimsical things that could possibly exist in this world. Because the thing is, it very well could. There is no concrete proof that these Doors don’t exists, that there aren’t other worlds existing right next to ours, with the passageways that lead to them only visible to those who believe in them. I can say with confidence and no shame that I believe in them. I realize that this isn’t much of an actual review, as it’s mostly just me rambling half-mad about the possibility of magic and how much joy that possibility gives me, but this is what this book has made me feel and therefore this is what I shall write about.

What I didn’t love
The only critique that I could possibly say is that I was pretty confused with the format at the beginning. Basically, you are reading a book in the third person that is currently being written by the main character, who is also the narrator, and within that book she is reading another book by a different author/narrator/character. Maybe this is due to the fact that my first few reading sessions for this book were late at night while I was half asleep, but I was SO confused until I figured out that some chapters were the reading of a different book. But once I got it I thought it was genius! That, and I found it to start off pretty slow; while I did like it from the very beginning, it took me quite a while to actually get really really into it

Overall thoughts
Read this book. If you are someone who has lost touch with your inner child, read this. Even if you haven’t and you’ve always managed to hold onto that beautiful, precious piece of yourself, read this too. This book is for anything who wants to (or already does) believe in magic.