Among Others

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 because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.

Mori is Welsh, sees elves and dabbles in magic. After some spectacular, magical incident that cripples her and kills her twin sister Mor, she flees from her abusive mother and the reader gets to follow her to her new boarding school where she is an outsider from the start. Mori spends all her spare time reading SFF books and the name-dropping builds up a crazy reading list of classics up to 1980 (most of the story takes place in 1979).

...what I did was dangerous, trying for a karass. Maybe I shouldn’t have extended it beyond the protection, which I really needed to do. Doing magic for things you want yourself isn’t safe. Glorfindel told me that. Most of what I want I can’t have for years, if at all. I know that. But a karass shouldn’t be impossible, should it? Or too dangerous to try for? Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it worked. That’s always the problem with magic. One of the problems. Among the problems...

And then she finds a SFF book club at the local library, makes friends, and somehow I got drawn in. Somewhere around the two thirds mark I started rooting for Mori to get her act together.

Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.

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 every now and then it's as though the writer cannot help falling into the fantasy pattern and this is especially true of the end. In many ways the ending is beautiful, but it belongs in a different book, one in which the magical elements have been built up and the harmful enemy introduced much more powerfully.

As it is, this feels like a dreamy float down the river which suddenly becomes a roller-coaster in the last few seconds.

Still, there is a lot to remember and think about and Mor, the heroine, has become another one of those remarkably real fictional people I've got to know over the years.

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 mystique.

I also liked that "is it real or isn't it?" feel of the book. Reading as a teenager, I never would have questioned that the subtle magic in the book was indeed the highest reality. But I love Walton's depiction of that subtle magic, which as an adult, you can't help but second guess: "maybe Mor is just subconsciously coming up with a narrative to explain why bad thing X happened." I love that the book works on both levels and that it forces you to consider both -- it's such a great way to depict magic.

So what didn't I like? Well, I think my expectations were set too high by Jon and Beka, who both said this book was the most amazing thing in the history of books. Also, while reading the book I had an overwhelming, terribly distracting sense of how much I would have loved this book if I had read it back when I was 18. My 18 year old self would have promptly declared it her favorite book in the history of books, too, but since I'm no longer her, I felt almost guilty reading it.

Ultimately, I just felt like I didn't "get it." So, there's this girl, and some bad magic happened in her past, and now she goes to a boarding school, where she's a little social isolated, but then she joins a book club and along the way she buys a lot of books and sees a lot of faeries, and that's all well and good, but when is the plot going to begin? Oh, the book is over, so I guess there just isn't a plot? And I can handle a lack of a plot if the character growth and development is well done, but after awhile I got bored of reading about Mor read and go to bookstores, and I would rather be reading and going to bookstores myself.

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 journal to Frodo returning to the Shire.

Mori moves to live with her long estranged father, who sets her up at a boarding school. The majority of the tale is a coming of age story as she grapples with the culture of an upper-crust English boarding school, seeks refuge in books, and tries to establish contact with the local fairies as she had in Wales. She meets her estranged family, tries to come to terms with them, meets a group of fellow SF fans, and tries to fend off magical attacks from her mother.

Ultimately, the book is centered around her joy in reading and the refuge and salvation the books provide for her. The narrator devotes many lines in their diary to reactions to various books, primarily SF.

It's a courageous book, in that it takes so many risks by having what could be considered the epic plot elements (preventing her mother from taking over the world) occur only outside the narrative itself. Instead, that information is shared as an aside and in conversation. The fallout from this, such as her mother's attacks, is addressed, but secondary to the personal growth plot line.

That being said, there are times that all the talk of SF books, while enjoyable, gets to feel like a bit of a distraction from the other elements of the story. Also, since her magical system is deniable and only loosely explained, it ,ales the final showdown between her and her mother to feel a little odd, since we've never seen magic work like that before in the book. Which makes it feel like that scene isn't really earned, especially since so much of that conflict is left off of the page. It's all matter-of-fact to Mori.


It's a well-written, and ambitious work, especially for what it leaves out of the story, and the coming of age stuff is really quite moving. However, as discussed above, if you don't have a good familiarity with SF canon, this could leave you cold as the narrator spends a lot of time discussing the worms she's reading, which can get tiresome even for insiders.

Plus, there are some glaringly unearned scenes such as the aforementioned final conflict. The worst offender by far is the scene where her father tries to crawl into her bed, which is never set up and never readdressed. It's needlessly shocking, and adds nothing to the story except an opportunity to name check Heinlein.

All and all, this book is worth reading, and while I quite enjoyed it, what you take away from it will vary widely based on the reader.

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 books that I love beyond all reason, and read over and over. But this came closer than most.

Heartily recommended.