I became a great fan of Alex E. Harrow after devouring her novel The Once and Future Witches earlier this year; The Ten Thousand Doors of January further confirmed my opinion of her exceptional wordworking and worldbuilding skills. January Scaller, a girl who has never quite fit in, steps through Doors on a journey of self-discovery to learn her true name, her true nature and her true gifts. So many themes are touched upon along the way (identity, culture, colonialism, greed, freedom, power, prejudice, difference, privilege) that the story captivated me and gave me ample food for thought. It also tapped into my love of myths, legends and folk tales by linking them to these mysterious gates between worlds:
"All I know is there are these places — sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you're doing a certain kind of looking — where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories."
It's said that, at some stage in their lives, many women cease to care about other people's opinions and society's expectations towards them; they speak their minds candidly, without self-consciousness or self-censure. Marguerite Duras proves herself to be one such in La Vie matérielle (strangely translated as Practicalities in English), a thankfully brief collection mostly made up of short interview transcripts reworked for publication. I'm afraid the point of this book escapes me. There's no unifying theme here, no coherence at all; the only overarching element may be the author's uncompromising attitude. A number of these texts made me distinctly uncomfortable, especially since she describes what's clearly child sexual abuse — including an episode on a train — almost with a shrug. Although she's extremely open about sex, she holds the narrow views of her time regarding homosexuality and the gender binary. I wonder what she'd think of today's discourse of gender fluidity, as well as our condemnation of grooming behaviours. I found something very troubling in the whole situation with her last "lover," Yann, with whom she appeared to have an intensely co-dependent relationship; it all feels so unhealthy. Perhaps what irked me most of all is how she discusses her alcoholism, but then again, if there's one things I consider more tedious than drunk people, it's people who go on and on about their drinking... I did learn something valuable regarding Marguerite Duras in reading this collection: I don't like her or her writing.
Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder by T.A. Willberg is a preposterously convoluted cross between Harry Potter and James Bond, in which supposedly brilliant individuals act in remarkably stupid ways. Why, in an agency filled with very competent, highly experienced investigators, is the murder of one of their own left for a first-year trainee to solve? I can't believe this absolute disaster has sequels. (And alchemy, really?)