The Ten Thousand Doors of January

This is a beautiful, lyrical story. It unfolds very slowly, with lots of side trips, and patience is really required. The descriptions are vivid and the prose is to be savored. But the third-person writing distances the characters somewhat, rendering them more as character sketches rather than fully-fleshed-out human beings. And I had to take off 1/2 star, because there is a point at which chronic naïveté becomes willful stupidity – something which seems to commonly occur in YA books – and unfortunately I think the main character hits that point well before the end, which pushed my suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point and marred my enjoyment somewhat. Nevertheless, this is a book well worth reading.