Portals and Puppies: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Alix E. Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a beautifully written portal fantasy with some interesting ideas, but it's light on world building for my tastes (don't expect to learn much about the worlds to which those portals lead). I picked this up because it's a Hugo nominee for Best Novel. So far Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is by a pretty wide margin my #1 pick, but this one might be a distant second.

The major strength is the writing. Honestly the writing carried me through a lot of the book when other aspects started to fall short. Harrow uses the idea of a group who wants to close portals as a metaphor for xenophobia and wall-building here in our world. The metaphor is clear, but without dominating the story.

The main character January is great. Maybe "bookish, precocious girl ahead of her time circa 1900" is a common enough character type, but I think she's fun to read about nonetheless, as is her dog Bad and her friend Samuel. I also like the book-within-a-book motif, but (and I realize this is a weird complaint) I would've liked more of it as an exercise in world building if anything else.

But aside from some lagging plot toward the middle, I was mainly disappointed by the lack of much real world building. All of these worlds we visit through the Doors sound fascinating (one of them sounds somewhat like Le Guin's Earthsea), but we never really learn much about them because we keep coming back to America circa 1900. So don't expect the sort of intense world building you find in other portal fantasy stories (although portals are just one of many ingredients in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I've been re-reading that lately so maybe that left me jonesing for some elaborate portal world building).

But maybe that's just not what Harrow is trying to do here. Maybe this is more a story about a girl growing up and trying to make this world better than it is about exploring other worlds. And who knows, maybe someday Harrow will let us fully explore some of those other worlds. I wouldn't be disappointed if she did.

See also my Goodreads review.