Among Others: Amazon.ca: Jo Walton: Books

Product Description

Review

“ A wonder and a joy.”
--The New York Times

“ Compelling… Never deigning to transcend the genre to which it is clearly a love letter, this outstanding (and entirely teen-appropriate) tale draws its strength from a solid foundation of sense-of-wonder and what-if.”
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

“ Beautifully crafted… Among Others calls to those who desire a wild, magical world in place of the one they have but eventually learn that their own lives are the greatest story of all."
--Bloomsbury Review

“ There are the books you want to give all your friends, and there are the books you wish you could go back and give your younger self. And then there's the rare book, like Jo W alton's Among Others, that's both.”
--io9.com

“An utterly amazing and beautiful book.”
--RT Book Reviews, Top Pick

Product Description

Startling, unusual, and irresistibly 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 science fiction, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.

As a child growing up in Wales, Morwenna played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. When her half-mad mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled—and her twin sister dead.

Fleeing to a father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England—a place all but devoid of true magic. There, 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, this is a stunning new novel by an author whose genius has already been hailed by dozens of her peers.

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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5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Review by Bibliotropic [...], Mar 6 2011

By

Ria Bridges (Saint John, New Brunswick Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

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5.0 out of 5 stars For Everyone Who Knows the Magic of Books, Feb 7 2011

By

Alison S. Coad (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

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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Amazon.com: 3.9 out of 5 stars (48 customer reviews)

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stunningly wonderful book, Feb 16 2011

By Elisabeth Carey - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Among Others (Hardcover)

This is a stunningly wonderful book.

I have never read anything that so perfectly captures the experience of being fifteen, a science fiction reader just discovering some of the greats of the field (not to mention fandom!), the new kid in school who doesn't quite fit in, the young woman just starting to reach for adulthood, and not sure where she fits in a family where no one except her imperfectly known father seems to share her interests and concerns.

Of course, Morwenna's problems are in a whole different league from my own at her age. Morwenna's twin sister was killed in a car accident that left Morwenna crippled. That accident was their witch mother's retaliation for their successful thwarting of her spell intended to make her a Dark Queen. Now Morwenna is dependent on the father she's never met.

On the one hand, Morwenna and her father Daniel bond over their love of science fiction. On the other hand, her aunts, his three sisters, decide that she belongs at Arlinghurst, the same boarding school they attended, so that's where she goes. It's a tough transition for her, a crippled girl among enthusiastic athletes, a Welsh girl amongst mostly upper middle class English girls, an enthusiastic reader amongst students who think reading is only for studying. But she's smart, and determined, and doesn't really see any better alternatives, so she finds ways to cope.

And as she struggles to find her own place, and her own friends, and her own path, she discovers that the threat from her mother is not over. Together with all the normal adolescent challenges, Morwenna also does battle with her mother's hostility and ambitions, the ethics of magic, and the desire and opportunity to be reunited with her sister.

This is a beautifully written book, lovingly and convincingly depicting both adolescent angst and the joys of discovering science fiction and the community of science fiction fandom.

Highly recommended.

I purchased this book and have received no compensation from the publisher or anyone else for reading and reviewing it.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magical, Jan 22 2011

By Janet - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Among Others (Hardcover)

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. That logical analysis can be quite funny, as she tries to make sense of the scoring system and rules in her new boarding school and family.

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.

32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Raised by books, Jan 21 2011

By Kai Jones - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Among Others (Hardcover)

A friend of mine says he was raised by wolves; I always say I was raised by books. Books provided the context, the subtext, and the text of my world. I was an alien, a misfit, uncomfortable in my family and at school. But in books I was the protagonist, I was normal, I was in worlds weird and fantastic, romantic and historical.

It's 1979 and Mor is fifteen. She, too, lives in books. She reveals her world to us and it is weird and fantastic, romantic and historial, all the while seeming ordinary and mundane on the outside.

This is a wonderful book about what it's like to feel different from everybody else, and the hope of discovering that you're not--that there are people enough like you to find community, even if it's not the family you were born into or the kids you grew up with. And it's also a book about how dangerous and necessary it is to change the world, or to refrain from changing the world, with magic and fairies and ghosts and witches.

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