302 pages
English language
Published Jan. 3, 2011 by Tor.
Seeking refuge in fantasy novel worlds throughout a youth under the shadow of a dubiously sane half-brother who dabbled in magic, Mori Phelps is forced to confront her mother in a tragic battle and gains unwanted attention when she attempts to perform spells herself.
What I really love about this book is all the references to other good books, and the main character's reflections on reading. I've read a lot of the books mentioned, but reading Among Others is encouraging me to seek out a lot of new reading material (particularly science fiction and philosophy).
Painful, because it's so familiar, and beautiful. One of those books that's so full of books itself that all you want to do when done is read some more. I think I've written a list based on Mori's reading.
The gushing reviews that are springing up everywhere are right. This is a wonderful novel. I fell in love with the voice, which reminded me of Dodie Smith's 'I Capture the Castle'. It's a precocious 15 year old's journal, as she navigates the confusions of adolescence, darkened by her sister's death. She's lost her home with her extended family in Wales, and is living in an English girl's boarding school, with holidays at her father's house — the father that she just met for the first time. Her world includes fairies, and magic, and Walton does an amazing job of making that both believable, and at the same time making it feasible for it to be all in Mori's imagination. Mori is confident and analytical. She turns that analysis on herself, what she sees around her, and the books she reads.
She adores books, especially SF and fantasy. This book …
The gushing reviews that are springing up everywhere are right. This is a wonderful novel. I fell in love with the voice, which reminded me of Dodie Smith's 'I Capture the Castle'. It's a precocious 15 year old's journal, as she navigates the confusions of adolescence, darkened by her sister's death. She's lost her home with her extended family in Wales, and is living in an English girl's boarding school, with holidays at her father's house — the father that she just met for the first time. Her world includes fairies, and magic, and Walton does an amazing job of making that both believable, and at the same time making it feasible for it to be all in Mori's imagination. Mori is confident and analytical. She turns that analysis on herself, what she sees around her, and the books she reads.
She adores books, especially SF and fantasy. This book is a love letter to librarians, to interlibrary loan, and to SF fandom. She mentions all the books she's reading, with wonderful comments on them. It conjures up the wonder of discovering books as a child, if you were one of those kids. While many of the books she mentions are SF or fantasy, not all are. Others that come up include Josephine Tey, Mary Renault, Plato, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. She is thoroughly steeped in SF, though. When she has nightmares, and wakes up terrified, she uses the litany against fear from Dune — and it works.
I love Mori's observations:
- About she and her twin sister when they were eight years old and immersed in Narnia and Elidor: "...we were always looking for someone else to play with, preferably a boy, because in books that's the group you have to have to go into another world."
- On meeting a classmate at a record shop: "She was looking at a record called 'Anarchy in the U.K.' by a group called the Sex Pistols. It was a very ugly cover, but I am quite interested in anarchism because of 'The Dispossessed'."
Because this has gotten so much good press, so fast, there are spoilers all over the internet. I recommend reading it before venturing onto too many blog discussions. Once you have read it, do followup. The additional information I gleaned about some of the characters set off all sort of interesting new ideas.
