![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Among Others
Author: Jo Walton
Genre: Nostalgic boarding school urban fantasy
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: After being crippled by an accident/sacrifice that killed her twin, Morwenna finds herself at an unsympathetic boarding school with only the local science fiction club and a pack of fairies for friends.
Thoughts: This novel is two stories, possibly three.
One is about surviving a sacrifice one had never intended to survive. Morwenna and her sister resolve to die preventing her insane mother from gathering enough magical power to take over the world. But Morwenna survives, and is forced to deal with geeky adolescence in 1970s England by herself instead of moving on with her sister after their heroic battle.
One is merely implied, in which a girl with a mentally unstable mother begins her own slide into schizophrenia.
The final, perhaps truest, story is a love letter to science fiction written by, for, and about someone who finds her first real peers amongst the pages.
This is a quiet book about adolescence--most of the drama has already happened and will only be tangentially referred to over the course of the book. It's about the little things--meaningless feuds, rumors and shaky alliances, the longing for someone like you or even to know who "you" are. It's written as a diary, the way only a teenage girl would view her life. Woven throughout are the great science fiction and fantasy classics, voraciously torn through as only a teenager can read. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Tiptree, LeGuin, McCaffery, Zelazny--the more of them you've read, the more the book will resonate. It's a novel written for people like me, who had few friends but inhaled books. The books are as real to her as the events in her life, and perhaps more important. They are a prism through which to view a world that doesn't make a lot of sense, a way to interpret the illogical reactions of those around her. (But the view given is skewed, which leads to its own problems.) And when she discovers others like herself, it's a revelation.
It's a deeply familiar book, in its loneliness and in its love and bonding over other books. I haven't read everything referenced, which is unfortunate--I suspect a working knowledge of Triton would have made one conversation much clearer. But I've read a lot of them, and I know that feeling of panic at not having enough to read. I know what it's like to inhale multiple books a day, disappearing into another world at any available opportunity.
Most of the conflict is implied--letters from an abusive mother who does not appear until a few pages from the end, ominous hints from disliked aunts, an absence of interaction rather than an abundance of it. The magic is highly coincedental (although the rules are satisfactorily laid out), so while Morwenna actively practices magic and interacts with fairies in a very concrete way, there is always the possibility in the back of your mind that she is an entirely unreliable narrator and none of the magic is real. While this is not a major theme, it cannot completely be ignored.
I do have some qualms with the way things are wrapped up (minor spoilers follow). I think one of the great overarching questions is whether or not magic can be justified and how much of her relationships are because of magic instead of a quality of hers. Unfortunately, this question is mostly dropped in favor of the less developed and interesting question of how much Morwenna wants to join her twin.
This means that several interesting lines are not pursued. The exact details of the first showdown with Liz are never made clear, although I think that's a valid artistic decision. More annoyingly, we do not discover whether Wim likes her for herself, likes her becaues Morwenna's magic made him do so, or likes her because he wants access to magic himself. We do not find out exactly why Morwenna ended up having the hip adjustments that leave her in the hospital for a week--was it accidental that it made things worse, or malice (and by whom)? There is a single paragraph that strongly hints that our narrator is, in fact, not Morwenna but Morganna and that she switched with her dying twin. It's never explained, developed, or confirmed. It's frustrating. Really, I would have liked to see Mori decide, not whether to join her sister, but what is an ethical use of magic so that she does not become like her mother or even like Wim. It's a pity that the question, toyed with throughout the novel, is abandoned to make a neat ending.
Author: Jo Walton
Genre: Nostalgic boarding school urban fantasy
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: After being crippled by an accident/sacrifice that killed her twin, Morwenna finds herself at an unsympathetic boarding school with only the local science fiction club and a pack of fairies for friends.
Thoughts: This novel is two stories, possibly three.
One is about surviving a sacrifice one had never intended to survive. Morwenna and her sister resolve to die preventing her insane mother from gathering enough magical power to take over the world. But Morwenna survives, and is forced to deal with geeky adolescence in 1970s England by herself instead of moving on with her sister after their heroic battle.
One is merely implied, in which a girl with a mentally unstable mother begins her own slide into schizophrenia.
The final, perhaps truest, story is a love letter to science fiction written by, for, and about someone who finds her first real peers amongst the pages.
This is a quiet book about adolescence--most of the drama has already happened and will only be tangentially referred to over the course of the book. It's about the little things--meaningless feuds, rumors and shaky alliances, the longing for someone like you or even to know who "you" are. It's written as a diary, the way only a teenage girl would view her life. Woven throughout are the great science fiction and fantasy classics, voraciously torn through as only a teenager can read. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Tiptree, LeGuin, McCaffery, Zelazny--the more of them you've read, the more the book will resonate. It's a novel written for people like me, who had few friends but inhaled books. The books are as real to her as the events in her life, and perhaps more important. They are a prism through which to view a world that doesn't make a lot of sense, a way to interpret the illogical reactions of those around her. (But the view given is skewed, which leads to its own problems.) And when she discovers others like herself, it's a revelation.
It's a deeply familiar book, in its loneliness and in its love and bonding over other books. I haven't read everything referenced, which is unfortunate--I suspect a working knowledge of Triton would have made one conversation much clearer. But I've read a lot of them, and I know that feeling of panic at not having enough to read. I know what it's like to inhale multiple books a day, disappearing into another world at any available opportunity.
Most of the conflict is implied--letters from an abusive mother who does not appear until a few pages from the end, ominous hints from disliked aunts, an absence of interaction rather than an abundance of it. The magic is highly coincedental (although the rules are satisfactorily laid out), so while Morwenna actively practices magic and interacts with fairies in a very concrete way, there is always the possibility in the back of your mind that she is an entirely unreliable narrator and none of the magic is real. While this is not a major theme, it cannot completely be ignored.
I do have some qualms with the way things are wrapped up (minor spoilers follow). I think one of the great overarching questions is whether or not magic can be justified and how much of her relationships are because of magic instead of a quality of hers. Unfortunately, this question is mostly dropped in favor of the less developed and interesting question of how much Morwenna wants to join her twin.
This means that several interesting lines are not pursued. The exact details of the first showdown with Liz are never made clear, although I think that's a valid artistic decision. More annoyingly, we do not discover whether Wim likes her for herself, likes her becaues Morwenna's magic made him do so, or likes her because he wants access to magic himself. We do not find out exactly why Morwenna ended up having the hip adjustments that leave her in the hospital for a week--was it accidental that it made things worse, or malice (and by whom)? There is a single paragraph that strongly hints that our narrator is, in fact, not Morwenna but Morganna and that she switched with her dying twin. It's never explained, developed, or confirmed. It's frustrating. Really, I would have liked to see Mori decide, not whether to join her sister, but what is an ethical use of magic so that she does not become like her mother or even like Wim. It's a pity that the question, toyed with throughout the novel, is abandoned to make a neat ending.
