Among Others by Jo Walton

[lightreads]

Among Others by Jo Walton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


…Huh.

So this is the sequel to a book that doesn't exist. That book -- the prequel -- is a standard issue fantasy about Mor and her twin sister growing up in Wales and seeing faeries, and how they save the world. This book is about the aftermath -- about Mor sent away from home, and grieving, and having to live in the world of school and estranged relatives after all she's done and seen. Having to live disabled in the world, I should clarify. And it's about that -- a coming into the mundane world because that's where we all grow up, ultimately, even if like Mor we read instead of breathing and don't really understand other people.

I don't . . . it didn't . . . yeah, not quite. Should have loved it -- my buttons, there they are. And yet? There was a lot of trying too hard, a lot of all my female geeky readers who grew up in books will love this! if you know what I mean.

Still. Mor has an excellent voice (and Katherine Kellgren does a beautiful reading, really, I can't recommend the commercial audio highly enough.) And it is lovely and strange and unlike anything I can think of. And important, I think, in the ongoing conversation about fantasy literature and what parts of it belong to childhood and what to adulthood (see Lev Grossman, to name one). I just . . . I don't think it's quite as important a contribution to that conversation for me as a lot of people apparently found it to be.




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Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

Pretty much all of this, yes.

Also-- I liked the idea of magic in this book, the way it's slippery and deniable and protects itself from analysis. But I really, really couldn't believe that a character as compulsively analytical and self-analytical as Mor wouldn't have spent a lot more time and headspace trying to figure it out-- to what her mother's averted apocalyptic plan had been, what she and her sister had struggled to stop. Even if she has made up all of the magic, I would have expected her to strengthen the delusion by working out the details, not by letting it all slide. Her lack of curiosity comes off as a sign of illness, more than anything else-- a flat affect of the imagination-- but one that's not reflected in her thinking or reading on any other subject.

(Side note: The reading I think makes most sense is that the fairies and their magic are completely real, and that Mor's mother is a sorceress-- but that she's just a hedge-witch, her mental illness and abusiveness are nothing to do with her magic, and she was never brewing up an apocalypse or threatening harm to anyone but her children, and the world-saving is all delusion on Mor's part. But I can't tell whether it's so much that that reading is supported, or that other readings really aren't.)

[lightreads]

I like your reading a lot. It makes sense to me, and also it lets me discard a lot of my irritable grumbling about what the hell Walton was doing with all that. I just could never tell what the whole "is it real?" question was doing. E.g. that moment where Mor thinks, "oh, yes, of course, the aunts are witches." And I was like "paranoid delusion! paranoid delusion!" And then . . . nothing. It was as if that question was supposed to be doing something very important in the book that never materialized.