Among Others

302 pages

English language

Published Jan. 3, 2011 by Tor.

ISBN:
978-0-7653-2153-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
648922858

View on OpenLibrary

(65 reviews)

"The way I like to describe it is that it’s about a science fiction reader who has fantasy problems. It’s 1979, she’s fifteen, she’s just saved the world from her evil mother at great cost, the world doesn’t know and doesn’t care and she has to go to boarding school." (Jo Walton)

2 editions

.

This was really a miss for me. I got a very similar feeling as with Never Let Me Go, where I spent the whole book being irritated with the characters and waiting for the story to begin.

The most enjoyable part for me was reading about the characters geeking out about classic scifi and fantasy.

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

As the reviews I read were mixed on this one it took me a long time to figure out if I wanted to read it. Then I discovered that this is a book about books and of course I had to read it.

I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

But... Magical Realism is not my genre, most books from the genre that I attempted ended up on my DNF shelf. And the plot starts slow and is next to non-existent, it is just diary entries from the teenage protagonist, Mori. And she is weird.

You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was …

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

Really well thought out system of questioning, trap scenarios, and social interaction. Very much enjoyed it. Very much not a style of book I usually like - journal format almost always drives me nuts - but this author proved it can be done well and unobtrusively. Much fun.

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

I feel rather confused about this book.
On the one hand, it's quite amazing. I'll certainly remember the main character, a girl who can see fairies but is utterly un-twee and matter of fact about them. I loved the character of 15 year old Mor, prickly, intelligent, and vulnerable as she is.

On the other hand, this book seems to be unsure what it is. It plays quite cleverly with the oh so familiar fantasy tropes, and does so in a way that's satisfying rather than trite (and that's not easy to do). The story start after the point where most fantasy stories end: the great evil have been overthrown, the heroine has suffered loss and is getting on with her life.

If you can accept the story on its own terms, and dont expect it to follow the pattern of a fantasy genre book, it's quite absorbing. But then …

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

A fascinating novel that is not exactly a coming-of-age story but still about growing up. Light on plot, rich in atmosphere, the book's greatest strength is how it gets it exactly right, being young, not fitting in right, and how books and reading is what makes life bearable and what a revelation it is to find that there are others who also care about these things.

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

The best part of the book was so nostalgic -- the idea of combing bookstores and finding The Book! The Amazing Fantasy or SciFi book that you've never heard of before, but it's by your favorite author and it is just so perfect! Finding The Book in bookstores and on my friends' book cases was a huge part of my adolescent years. It makes me kind of want to earmark the authors that Walton name checks that I've never read: (Zelazny, Delany, Tiptree embarrassingly enough) and never Amazon or Google them and only hunt down their books in used bookstores to recreate the feeling. But I know that truly that feeling is a little eradicated, because even if I play by the rules, I know that they're arbitrary and in real life I can get whatever book I want whenever I want, which is great, except that it ruins the …

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

This is a Fantasy for Sci-Fi book lovers.

It was easy to identify with the book loving nerdy and disabled heroin.
The constant author/book name dropping is fun for the books I've read but not so much for those I haven't. I'm not sure how someone that doesn't read much clasic Sci-Fi will enjoy this.

I did find the heroin a bit too powerful, there are no holes in her magical education. She has a full proof solution to every danger. The question isn't how the magic works but how it should be used.
It is a good question, but a bit more danger would have been more gripping.

I would have liked to see more glimpses of the year that passed between the prologue and the first chapter. However this is not what the book is about, it's about the characters rebirth and growth after a tragedy, a wonderful …

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

Understated writing makes you forget sometimes how big the story is. Saving the world and having friends are both massively important - in that way it captures being a teenager much better than most fantasy. The protagonist was brave and interesting and it felt so good to see some of my own struggles with disability on the pages of a book like this. It made me fall in love with reading all over again and made me wish for more trains to do it on.

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Storygraph'

Liked it, but didn't love it. I love Morwenna's attachment to the library :-) Overall I simply didn't trust her very much. And to be honest, I got a bit bored at times. Perhaps I'm used to more action in fantasy novels? There was something about the style (written from Morwenna's perspective via her journal entries) that made me feel very separated from the action and the characters. Not sure how I feel about that.

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

While I was reading this book, my wife asked me what I thought of it so far. I told her I didn't know yet, which was true. This is the sort of book that is hard to evaluate one way or another until you finish it. Once I finished it, she asked me again. I was still unsure of how I felt about it.

There's a lot to like in this book, but it has its share of problems.


The narrator is Mori, a 15 year old Welsh girl, who long before the book begins was involved in using magic to prevent her witch of a mother from using magic to take over the world. As a result of that battle, she ended up crippled and her twin sister died. However, all that went down before the book begins. This is about what came after, as she observes, comparing her …

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

A lovely, gentle read that transports you to a simpler place and time. I found the characters charming, and I adore Jo Walton's take on magic here. The inherent ambiguity in both the magic itself, and whether it's real or simply in Morwenna's imagination, is intriguing, and keeps you wondering about it all the way through the book. I also liked Mori's internal dilemmas over her karass.

I didn't always find Morwenna herself to be the most sympathetic of protagonists, but I certainly did identify with her - especially with her feelings of being an outsider, and of course with her love of books in general, and SF books in particular. In many ways, this novel is a love story - not love between characters, but love of reading and love of SF.

It takes a lot to get a 5-star rating from me - that's mostly reserved for those …

Review of 'Among Others' on 'Goodreads'

Like I Capture the Castle, I wish I'd read this book when I was a teenager. It's the sort of book that I wish I'd written as a teenager. Makes me miss youth's closeness to other worlds, as a way of dealing with all that angst. I wouldn't want to go back there, apart from to say 'these are the things that get better'; 'these are the things to make the most of now'. And this book reminded me of all that. Especially the consolation of books.

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Subjects

  • Books and reading
  • Young women
  • Fiction
  • Magic
  • Mothers and daughters

Places

  • England

Lists