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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Alix E. Harrow
Alix Harrow has written a delightful and richly written fantasy tale set in the early 1900’s in Vermont. January Scaller is the ward of Mr. Cornelius Locke while her father Julian travels around the world finding ancient artifacts for Mr. Locke. She feels like the artifacts that fill his mansion: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place. Over the ten years of her father’s travels, she finds mysterious things that appear in a blue chest in the Pharaoh room that she thinks are from her father, including a book that tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure, and danger. Eventually January finds the origin of her own story within its pages and sets out to find her parents. The story flows with beautiful, organic metaphors: “His voice was lower and rougher than it had been before, as if he’s replaced his lungs with rusting iron bellows.” “The old man’s eyes remained narrowed and suspicious, a pair of damp blue marbles set in deep folds of flesh.”
“Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.”
“No one really remembers their own origins. Most of us possess a kind of hazy mythology about our early childhood, a set of stories told and retold by our parents, interwoven with our blurred baby memories. They tell  us about the time we nearly died crawling down the stairs after the family cat; the way we used to smile in our sleep during thunderstorms; our first words and steps and birthday cakes. They tell us a hundred different stories, which are all the same story: We love you, and have always loved you.”
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