Among Others in Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy

Aug 12, 2013 Trice rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi-fantasy, childrens-ya, cymru, audio, britannia, books-about-books, sff-bkclub, 2016

I truly love this book, but a word of warning: don't expect it to be rollicking adventure type fantasy - it's much more the contemplative type with intense but incredibly brief and subtle moments of numinous action.

It evoked in me what Terry Pratchett's Band with Rocks In in Soul Music calls "hole" which is a deepest sense of home. It made me ache for Wales, a country of green and rolling hills that rooted my heart in less than 6months, and even though I somehow missed the "yes, no"s of the nor ...more

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Dec 11, 2016 Ash rated it did not like it

Shelves: naah, ya-fantasy, 2016-read, 0-hugo-nebula, epistolary, books-about-books, library, fabulist-fiction

Who even thought of classifying this book under science fiction and fantasy, forget about the people who gave it Hugo and Nebula awards. The only magical element in this book is the narrator mentioning that her mother is a witch and the part where she talks to some boring fairies. That's it.

There is no science or fantasy in this book. I wouldn't even consider this a SFF book.
This is a boring journal about a girl who is sent to boarding school. This part I think the author was inspired from Malo Who even thought of classifying this book under science fiction and fantasy, forget about the people who gave it Hugo and Nebula awards. The only magical element in this book is the narrator mentioning that her mother is a witch and the part where she talks to some boring fairies. That's it.

There is no science or fantasy in this book. I wouldn't even consider this a SFF book.
This is a boring journal about a girl who is sent to boarding school. This part I think the author was inspired from Malory Towers and Anne of green gables (as she mentions these books herself).

But the events that happen in the school and this girl's life are so boring. Nothing happens. Her mother who is supposed to be mad and trying to kill her daughter makes an appearance after 297 pages and is gone after 2 pages. The blurb was so misleading. It is not about a girl trying to escape from her witch mother.

This is what the book is about - I read books x and y, person a gave me books x and y to read, I went to the bookstore to buy book x and y, I went to the library and read books z and b, I spoke to this girl in school and she was mean, I spoke to this person and we discussed about this book. So it is basically a journal of a boring teenager who keeps reading books. I couldn't read this book so had to force myself and skim through to see if something interesting happens, which did not.

Most irritating - she explains every single person in her family tree. Who the hell cares what her great grandfather's brother was doing or whom he married?!

Second most irritating - she mentions Lord of the rings so many times that I felt like puking, even though it is one of my all time favorite books.

Instead of reading this YA novel, it is better to read a proper science fiction/fantasy novel. Atleast we will be entertained. This is a good book for people who don't want a lot of fantasy elements and science in their SFF books but for a person who expects something related to the genre, other than names of books, this was disappointing. ...more

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May 06, 2012 Aleix Dorca rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

Hard, hard book to review.

I'm giving it 4 stars because I'm comparing it to other 2012 Hugo nominated books I've already read. This is the one I've liked to most so far BUT I feel cheated. And why is that? Because Jo Walton uses a trick citing other SF masters that I don't know if I like to much.

You see, every time she, or Mor, says this or that book is bril, the reader goes back to his memories and relives the memory he/she has of that particular book incorporating those feelings into this boo ...more

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Jul 28, 2012 Fungus Gnat rated it liked it

After a brief prelude recalling a happier life several years before, we are placed with our narrator at the story’s true beginning, in September 1979. Our hero is 15-year-old Morwenna, the surviving member of a pair of twins. She has a painfully injured leg that hampers her movement, has been sent from her beloved Wales to live with three tiresome rich aunts in a country house in Shropshire, and is just starting classes at an expensive, strict boarding school where almost all the other girls are After a brief prelude recalling a happier life several years before, we are placed with our narrator at the story’s true beginning, in September 1979. Our hero is 15-year-old Morwenna, the surviving member of a pair of twins. She has a painfully injured leg that hampers her movement, has been sent from her beloved Wales to live with three tiresome rich aunts in a country house in Shropshire, and is just starting classes at an expensive, strict boarding school where almost all the other girls are “upscale” from her and don’t mind showing her up. She is also, although she tries not to show it, grief-stricken over the loss of her sister.

“We are placed with our narrator” is not an idle turn of phrase. We are there right with her when and where she writes, for the novel is a first-person narrative in the form of a journal, with one entry almost every day, over a period of five and a half months. “Narrative” is an idle turn of phrase, because, although a story is told over the course of the book, it doesn’t move like a conventional story, it moves more like the series of diary entries that it is: On some days there are memorable events and on many others there are only her feelings and thoughts, what she bought at the store, her exam scores to report. Most of all, there is her reading. Morwenna is a voracious reader, of SF mostly, and her journal entries are filled with her reactions to, and her reports of arguments with other people on, the SF classics of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies—beginning with Tolkien and then onward through Heinlein, Delaney, Brunner, Tiptree, Silverberg, and others.

But despite her excitement over the SF she’s read and the prospect of reading more, her most prominent trait may be her earnestness—not surprising, since she believes she is in a Tolkienian cosmic struggle for power with her mother, whom she envisions as a witch. She is aided by a race of evanescent beings inhabiting the crossroads of nature and man’s ruins, a race she refers to, for lack of a better word, as “fairies.”

Walton makes this all work by keeping the narrative close to ground, with the focus on Morwenna’s more earthbound challenges, from getting to the library on Tuesday evenings to trying to make friends when she is so different from those around her. And her mom does seem at least, well, dysfunctional, and Morwenna does have reservations about the world of magic she partly inhabits. Because the magic is, as Morwenna says, “deniable,” it’s a little bit difficult to tell until fairly late in the book how much of it may be in her imagination.

Generally speaking, I was impressed, even stunned, by Walton’s achievement in creating such a complex and persuasive character, with all the wealth of detail that falls within her observation. In fact, if there’s a flaw it’d be that some of the observations and reactions seem beyond what I might expect a 15-year-old to come up with. And that’s to say nothing of her ability to read several books a week while going to school and still be able to quote passages from them when necessary. To say yet nothing again of the occasional use of anachronistic diction. Of course, truth is always a defense against such criticisms. And I’ve noticed that Walton was about the same age in 1979 as Morwenna. (“Who knew?” Okay, anyone who read her “Thanks and Notes,” I guess.) Well, one’s own experience is always fair game, even if it results in a deduction in originality points. And even if, after awhile, the endless string of reactions to SF works seems a little too transparently more likely to be the author’s own rather than what some entirely different person named Morwenna might reasonably be imagined to have thought. And of course, even if talking about SF is a cute way to rustle up one’s own global karass.

(view spoiler)

Still, this one has a superbly drawn lead character, a refreshingly unconventional manner of narration, an involving story, and a conclusion that is satisfying on its own terms. Overall, almost brill!
...more

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Jun 05, 2013 S H A R O N rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2013, dnf

[I also reviewed this title on my blog: Ishari's Bookshelf]

I was oh so looking forward to this read. Maybe I had too many expectations?

I managed to get through about half of it before I stopped and looked up some reviews to see if I was missing something. Maybe that's cheating? I don't know, but I am glad I checked the reviews. It seems like you either love this book for its homage to classic science fiction and the good ol' interlibrary loan days at the library before e-readers came onto the s ...more

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Oct 02, 2014 Jason rated it it was ok

Shelves: started-and-stopped

I was excited to read this book based on the awards it received. Major disappointment. The book's plot was barely noticeable after a 100 pages. The vast majority of the book was filled with very brief, vague (and I mean vague, like half a sentence) allusions to obscure science fiction books written 40 years ago that I had never heard of. Apparently the geniuses who give away Nebula and Hugo awards thought this was the best thing ever. I couldn't finish the book and wish I could get my money back ...more

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Feb 03, 2014 Laramie rated it it was ok

Written as a series of journal entries, I found it difficult to connect with the style of this book. The pacing is very slow, the book does not have a strong plot, etc. what it has is a list of golden age sci-fi...

If I had had anything else to read on that airplane I likely would have read that instead.

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Jun 21, 2012 Xdyj rated it really liked it

Shelves: fa, o, q, sfhf_challenge, rtw, uk

An (IMO) original and beautiful story about a 15/16-year-old sf/f fan dealing w/ British boarding school & physical disability while trying to come to terms w/ the death of her twin sister in a traffic accident, and (somewhat ambiguously) fairies. It is written in the form of a slice-of-life diary, which also includes her comments on hundreds of major sf/f works & in some sense sketched the English-language science fiction scene up to 1979/1980.

p.s. an interesting thing to do while reading this ...more

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