- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (Jan 18 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 076532153X
- ISBN-13: 978-0765321534
- Product Dimensions: 24.2 x 16.4 x 2.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#144,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #86 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Mothers & Children
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“A hymnal for the clever and odd—an inspiration and a lifeline to anyone who has ever felt in the world, but not of it.” —Cory Doctorow , New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother
“If you love SF and fantasy, if reading it formed your teen years, if you do remember the magic you used to do, if you remember the absolute joy of first discovering those books, then read this.” —Robin Hobb, New York Times bestselling author of Assassin’s Apprentice
“A lovely story, unlike anything I’ve ever read before: funny, touching, and gently magical.” —Patrick Rothfuss, New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Wind
“If you love SF and fantasy, if reading it formed your teen years, if you do remember the magic you used to do, if you remember the absolute joy of first discovering those books, then read this.” —Robin Hobb, New York Times bestselling author of Assassin’s Apprentice
“A lovely story, unlike anything I’ve ever read before: funny, touching, and gently magical.” —Patrick Rothfuss, New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Wind
Product Description
Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.
Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead.
Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England–a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off…
Combining elements of autobiography with flights of imagination in the manner of novels like Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, this is potentially a breakout book for an author whose genius has already been hailed by peers like Kelly Link, Sarah Weinman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
One of School Library Journal’s Best Adult Books 4 Teens titles of 2011
One of io9's best Science Fiction & Fantasy books of the year 2011
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Quite,
By SoMisguided.com "somisguided" (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Among Others (Hardcover)
Among Others is a book that is not quite fantasy, not quite British schoolgirl novel, and not quite anything at all. It's a rambling, stream-of-consciousness series of diary entries by a 15-year-old Welsh girl who does a bit of low-level magic. Nothing really happens which makes this a pretty boring book. The nice thing about it is the great list of science fiction and fantasy books mentioned throughout. It's a long way to go for a reading list, but pleasant enough.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review by Bibliotropic [...],
By
This review is from: Among Others (Hardcover)
There are few books that I can close and say with certainty that they have an assured place on my bookshelf for the foreseeable future. This was absolutely one of those books.Among Others is the fantasy tale for realists, a story for storytellers, and a companion for those who were bibliophiles and loners through their childhoods. This is a book that not only makes you wish that it didn't end so that you could keep on reading, but also makes you want to pick up every single other book mentioned within its pages so that you can read them all, too. And believe me, there are a lot of them! I loved how magic worked in this book. Not in big loud flashy ways but in all the subtle ways that make the world work, the ways that reach out and back and connect everything to everything else, and where the real trick is in believe it and knowing it for what it is. That interconnectivity is what made this book truly amazing. We come in not at the beginning or end of a story, but somewhere in the middle, because the story is life. At times, it felt like a wonderful homage to all those who ever put down a story and wanted to know more about what happened later, because the bulk of the action, the powerful event that shaped lives, happened before Mori starts telling her tale in the first place. But there was still the connection to it. As was there also the connection of the end, the fall of Liz and the events surrounding it, to the very beginning when Mori dropped that first flower in the water and set magic in motion. It was gratifying to see that. Also interesting was the way the story was told as though reading Mori's diary. Which meant that in addition to the big events that you expect in fantasy, like magic and fairies and all the supernatural elements, you also get a focus on school and growing up and personal likes and dislikes. These things are just as important to the main character as they would be to anyone who can do magic and yet who still is forced to live in the real world, with all its mundane troubles and trials. A good balance was struck. Ultimately, I think that anyone who passes over this book is going to sorely miss out, because what Walton does here is profound, powerful, and deeply affecting. More than just creating a good story, more than just making a character who can be related to, more than striking that balance between the mundane and the supernatural (or rather, the natural, if you want to look at it that way), all of these things combined to make something that I think is greater than the sum of its parts. This is truly a novel not to be missed.
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Everyone Who Knows the Magic of Books,
By
This review is from: Among Others (Hardcover)
There are books one reads, and books one falls into; Mori, Jo Walton's 15-year-old protagonist in "Among Others," knows this because almost the only way she can relate to other people, or life, or anything, is through the books she reads and falls into. "Lord of the Rings" is her top example, of course, but she loves anything science-fictional or fantastical in particular, with historical drama not too far behind. Oh, and she can see and communicate with fairies. It's late 1979/early 1980, and Mori is adrift - her identical twin sister Mor is dead and she herself is crippled by the same cause, and she has been sent from her home in Wales to a girl's boarding school in England, where, knowing that she'll never fit in, she sensibly uses her otherness to make most of her classmates afraid of her, thereby most likely to leave her alone. But she's lonely, and misses her family back home (especially her dead sister), and she misses running and being whole. When she finds a small science fiction book-reading club in the small town in which her school is situated, she hopes she's found her karass, her group of true friends who share her passions. But there's still the threat of her mother, the witch who caused all this upheaval and pain....I fell into "Among Others" even as I was never certain, not until the very end, if Mori was truly the surviving half of a twinship, a girl who could see fairies and make magic (but a very special sort of magic, one with complete deniability) and a young woman threatened by an insane and evil mother, or if she was entirely delusional. Charles deLint, in his review of this novel in Fantasy & Science Fiction (Jan/Feb 2011 edition), describes it as having jumped onto his "short list of favorite books ever," and I agree - this is realistic YA fantasy, at its best. I want the world to be like this. Simply stunning.
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