72 pages • 2 hours read
Alix E. HarrowThe Ten Thousand Doors of January
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Blue Door”
January Scaller lives with her father’s employer, Mr. William Cornelius Locke, in his grand mansion in Vermont called Locke House. Locke is the wealthy owner of W. C. Locke & Co., and head of the New England Archaeological Society, an exclusive club for collectors. He collects rare objects from all over the world, and January’s father, Julian, travels to find unique pieces for Locke’s collection. In her seven years of life, January has spent more time with Mr. Locke than with her own father, and Locke provides for January as if she is his daughter.
In 1901, when January is seven years old, she accompanies Locke on a business trip to Western Kentucky. During Locke’s business meeting, she escapes from their hotel and runs to an overgrown field. She notices a run-down blue doorway standing in the field and longs for it to lead to a new and exciting place. She begins to write a story in her special leather diary about a magic Door, and feels an unexplainable shift in the world around her, “like an earthquake that didn’t disturb a single blade of grass” (10). When she steps through the Door, January stands in emptiness for a moment, then steps completely through and finds herself “in a world made of salt water and stone” surrounded by the ocean (11). She hears Locke calling her name in the distance, and only pauses to pick up a silver coin before stepping back through the Door to the Kentucky field.
As soon as she returns, Locke demands to know what she’s been doing, and she tells him about stepping through the Door into another world. He takes her diary and throws it into the field, telling her to stop believing in “fanciful nonsense” (14). The next day, January runs away again, back to the blue Door, but someone has burned it, and her diary lies among the ashes.
When they return to Locke House, Locke and January’s nursemaid Wilda lock her in her room for several days. At the end of her punishment, Locke crushes her imagination; he says she can no longer talk about Doors or other nonsense. Out of her desperate need for acceptance and love, she submits and resolves to be a good girl. When her father returns from his latest travels, January does not run to him as she used to. Although she does not tell her father about the blue Door, she keeps the silver coin from her short-lived adventure as her most precious possession.
Chapter 1 Analysis
January, the novel’s protagonist, narrates the story, looking back on her memories. The setting is 1901. Revolutions are in the past, while “peace and prosperity” (2) grow. Locke’s character embodies the prominent thinking of the day, that “Reason and rationality reigned supreme, and there was no room for magic or mystery” (3). He prizes order, peace, and progress and has no tolerance for fantasy. January finds no room in Locke’s orderly world for her discovery of the blue Door and the world that lies beyond it.
Harrow establishes contrasting ideas within Locke’s character and relationship with January. On the one hand, he provides for her and, in January’s own words, kindly and gently tells her to put away fantastic ideas about other worlds. On the other hand, he breaks her spirit by locking her in her room for three days. When he tells her to, “mind her place and be a good girl” (18), January succumbs out of his forcefulness and her desire to be worthy of Locke’s love. Once Locke breaks her wild and adventurous spirit, her relationship with her father changes. January feels he wasn’t there to rescue her when she needed him. She no longer runs to greet her father when he returns, and doesn’t tell him about the blue Door or ask him to recount stories from his travels.
Harrow introduces the theme of words and stories as holding great power. One example is the significance of particular letters and their shapes for constructing word meaning. January notes the personalities of capital letters, and makes a distinction between door and Door, noting that the capital D furthers the word’s meaning, “like a black archway leading into white nothing” (1). January also mentions the significance of capital letter shapes for words such as “Propriety” (4) and “Threshold” (11) to show that letters communicate attitudes and ideas. January also explains the power of stories, noting that stories lead people to Doors. January’s words, in just the beginning of a story, open the blue Door in the field. Finally, Harrow characterizes January as a lover of stories, especially adventures, and names book titles to show what January reads. The focus on words, books, and stories in the first chapter establishes the theme that words are powerful, and shows how words and stories will have a significant role in the novel.
Race is another of the novel’s major themes introduced in the first chapter. January’s copper-red skin makes her somewhat of a riddle to those she meets. People are unsure how to treat her: as Locke’s servant or adopted daughter. Due to Locke’s wealth and protection, January receives respect from others as long as Locke is near. Even at a young age, January can sense that having dark skin is a disadvantage in the eyes of society: “I didn’t really know what made a person colored or not, but the way he said it made me glad I wasn’t” (7). On the rare occasions when her father accompanies her rather than Locke, people stare more openly because of Julian’s red-black tattooed skin and black eyes. Harrow’s choice to create a neither white nor black main character allows her to show the way race dictated society’s perceptions of a person’s value in 20th-century America.
Harrow often describes smells to show January’s sensory perceptions of the world around her, as well as to differentiate between worlds. For example, in the Kentucky field, January smells cedar and grass, but when the Door opens, she smells salt, warm stone, and “a dozen faraway scents that did not belong in a scrubby field beside the Mississippi” (11). The use of smells continues throughout the novel as sensory imagery to put the reader in January’s shoes and contributes to the contrasts between places and worlds.
Finally, objects have significant meaning and prominence in the novel. Locke collects rare objects, and January mentions two objects in the first chapter that are important to her: the diary she found in the chest, and the silver coin she found in the world she discovered. The diary allows her to write the blue Door open, but burns alongside the Door, symbolizing the destruction of her belief in magic and Doors to other worlds. The silver coin becomes her most prized possession. It symbolizes her true self; the adventurous, free, and brave spirit she inherited from her parents; and continues as a symbolic and important object throughout the novel.
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By Alix E. Harrow
