Among Others: A Novel Paperback – January 3, 2012

Morwenna Phelps is a fifteen-year-old girl who has run away from her mother, whom she accuses of being a witch, to the father she had never met before. She is shipped off to boarding school. This book is her journal from September 1979 to February 1980. The book is a mix of fantasy (Mor, as she calls herself, sees fairies and does some magic), coming-of-age (as Mor navigates boarding school, friendships, and her first romance), and a love letter to reading and libraries as a way of coping with outsider status.I loved that last part most. Mor reads prolifically ("Eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn't as if they'll last me all week"), and she writes about the books she reads. It's almost all science fiction, and I'm sure it would be more appreciated by someone better versed in that literature, but her experience is very evocative for me, someone who also spent more afternoons growing up at the library than with friends. The few books that she talks about that I have read are the  The Sword of Shannara  and some Piers Anthony (both of which she slams as "crap," and she's probably right although I read it all as a youth, not nearly so discerning), Narnia,  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  (on which she and I agree - "hilarious and also wickedly clever"), and  The Lathe Of Heaven  and  The Lord of the Rings  (which I only read as an adult). Besides that, there is lots of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Vonnegut, and many authors I've never even heard of. I love how she extracts little bits from these books to inform her worldview. She knows she needs to study history, languages, and science from Heinlein ( Have Space Suit, Will Travel ). She uses the concept of the karass ("a group of people who are genuinely connected together", not to be confused with a "granfalloon, a group that has a fake kind of connection") from Vonnegut ( Cat's Cradle ) to define (and maybe create) the social group she seeks. Her thoughts of sex are informed by  Triton  and  The Charioteer . And so on.The fantasy element has a novel subtlety to it. She explains how, "You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. ... It makes those chains of coincidence. ... It's like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was just 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. ... If it's like books at all, it's more like  The Lathe Of Heaven  than anything" (40). That said, the fantasy element is really played down: Yes, there is some tension with her mother, and that comes to a bit of a climax, but it takes so little page space that it's hard to get caught up in the tension. (The book jacket makes it sound like Harry Potter and Voldemort!)Not a great deal happens in this book, but it reminded me of me enough to feel like spending time with someone I've just met but with whom I have lots in common.I was turned on to this book when the Bookslut blog posted the Hugo award nominees for 2012, and this was among them. I can see why; I hope it wins!Note on content: Not much language or violence, but this fifteen-year-old girl does talk about her thoughts on sex (and fools around a bit at one party), so there's that.Here are a few lines I really enjoyed:"Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open" (34)."Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts" (59)."Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization" (59)."He held my hand, which was nice, though it would have been nicer if it had left me with a free hand" (263)."Jewish people have to have special food. Sharon's special food seems much nicer than our school food. It comes on trays. I wonder if they'd give it to me if I told them I was Jewish? But what if I'm not Jewish enough and it killed me or made me sick?" (52)"I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.)" (259)

Okay, Walton is a gifted author in the fantasy genre and both the book and characters really held my interest. But WTF, the only SF elements here are SF book titles and their authors in protag’s weekly book club meeting. Otherwise it is straight upLight fantasy. Somebody clue me in, how did this happen?j

"Magic isn't inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people."Morwenna grew up in Wales in the 1970's after the coal mines had long since played out. She and her sister spent most of their childhood days roaming the ruins of the long-abandoned factories where the fairies of the forest taught them how to use magic.The story opens with Morwenna arriving in England at the age of fifteen to live with her father whom she has never met. She has survived a great battle with her mother, who may be mentally ill or may be, as Morwenna believes, an actual witch. The battle left Morwenna crippled but alive; it left her twin sister dead. She compares her life now to the Scouring of the Shire, a time when she must learn how to live after the climax is over.After hooking readers with this rather intriguing premise, this novel is content to amble leisurely forward, ever so slowly, doling out the full scope of its backstory and magic system one small revelation at a time.It is an urban fantasy.It is a coming of age story about a shy, quiet girl more caught up in books than real life.It is an homage to the great science fiction and fantasy novels of the mid-twentieth century. (Half the fun is trying to catch all the allusions and literary references. I added nearly a dozen new books to my to-read list).This particular form of magic always makes things happen through naturalistic means, so it can be easily explained or denied. As Morwenna describes it:"You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic… 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."This brings up interesting questions about causality. If you use magic to cause a rose to be dropped from an airplane, did you change the flight path of the plane? Maybe you caused the person who dropped the rose to be born and/or to take this particular trip on this particular day? If you use magic to find friends, are they really your friends, or are they just puppets you are manipulating?The parallel between this magic system and belief in prayer is rather ingenious and obvious, which may be why Morwenna inserts a long digression at one point about how she hates reading Narnia as religious allegory.Natural magic also means it is possible to read most of the book as if Morwenna is not living in a magical world at all; she could be just particularly imaginative and paranoid. As one character broadly hints, this type of reading would be analogous to Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, in which the title character wanders through a wonderful fantasy world believing himself to be stark raving mad.This book is beautiful at times, and certainly well-written, but be warned it is slow paced. I kept thinking the final hundred pages would be filled with a burst of expository explanation and some climactic confrontation, but … no. It is not that kind of book. The author does wrap up all the plots and answer all the questions, including whether the magic is real, but she does so in a plodding, intentionally anticlimactic fashion.Recommended, but it is probably not for everyone.

Mori is a welsh teenager who has lost her twin sister after a confrontation with their mother who was abusing magic.Told through diary entries, we follow Mori as she tries to live without her twin, is moved to a posh boarding school by her estranged father and struggles with her relationship with magic. The major issue is that Mori is obsessed with books and the author constantly (and i do mean constantly) 'name drops' authors and books. Its beyond tedious and really just comes across as the author trying to let people know how well read she is. Plus, if the reader hasn't read a certain book then Mori's reference to a certain character and how she is or is not like them is totally lost on the reader. That happened to me afew times and it was deeply frustrating.Then there's the magic elements. On the one hand i applaud the fact the author has tried to approach magic another way, its all very subtle and Mori herself struggles to describe what magic is and has her doubts if her magic has even worked. That said, there are times when it just comes off as meaningless gibberish. Some of the diary entries seem like philosophical musings, is a 15 year old girl really writing this? And even if she is, its pretty boring.Its a shame that what was a decent idea is hindered in the telling. For readers expecting a fantasy book it probably wont have enough fantasy elements. Ultimately, it seems that this book was written so the author could go on about Wales and list the books she's read, the result of which is that interesting aspects of the story are pushed onto the back burner.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this one, and I'm still not entirely sure what I got, but I loved it.Morwenna has run away from her insane and dangerous mother in the Welsh valleys and been returned to her long absent father and his reserved English sisters in Shropshire, where she is promptly dispatched to boarding school.Mor's diary recounts both her new life and the past which brought her here, telling the story of how she and her sister Morganna, killed in an accident that left Mor badly injured, and the fairies that the sisters have grown up seeing, fought the evil that her mother tried to perpetrate. She also tells of her love of science fiction, her inability to fit in, and her feelings for a boy named Wim whom she meets at the library on a rare visit away from the school.But Mor's battle against evil isn't over, and her dealings with the fairies not yet done.I really enjoyed the book, the writing was good but a little strange and jarring in places. Not sure if that was the author herself faltering slightly or a device she used for Mor's diary. I felt a lot was unexplained. We don't really know what Mor's mother did, or how she did it, what Mor herself was capable of or what really was happening right at the end. We don't know if every word Mor writes is true or if she is as deranged as her mother, Liz, is portrayed to be. We don't know what she sees when she sees the fairies, if they are real or if she is a lonely, damaged girl clutching at childhood fantasies to comfort herself and help her cope with tragedy and change. We can choose to believe or to wonder. But whatever you believe by the end of the book, Mor is a great character, interesting, ahead of her time, ahead of her peers, and her passion for her books and desire to learn is lovely and inspiring.I really didn't want this book to end and would love to know more. There's plenty left to find out, about the other characters who were also interesting (Sam, Daniel, the aunts, Auntie Teg) and plenty to find out about what Liz did and how she did it, why she did it, what she thought she would achieve and what she might do next.The descriptions of Wales and the valleys were fascinating and the sense of time and place was excellent.

I happened upon a mention of this recently and was so excited to receive it from Amazon. I spent my youth reading SF and much of my 20s ensuring I'd read every book that had won the Hugo and Nebula awards and give that this won both (a real achievement) I wasn't even put off by the fact that there is a strong fantasy element to this book (something I steer well away from).It starts well - the first-person journal of 15-year-old Mori, who has lost her twin sister in an accident caused by her black magic mother in an incident involving fairies and an explosion. The details aren't entirely clear, but we catch up as Mori moves away from the maternal side of her family to meet her father Daniel (who left when she was a baby) for the first time and attend a private girls school in Oswestry in 1979. Mori has a passion for reading, especially SF, and we watch as she ingratiates herself into an SF book club which meets weekly. Her father also reads avidly and there are many, many mentions of SF books - Zelazny, Heinlein, Le Guin, Silverberg and many other authors are referenced in mostly glowing terms.There are some wonderful tributes to authors, books and libraries. I loved libraries when I was young and I think the author did as well. "Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilisation" enthuses Mori, breathlessly, but I can't help but agree with her.But there are some problems for me with this book. Firstly there is less a plot, than a series of opportunities to mention books. And the interesting part of the back story (witch mother, dead twin) is never explored in any detail and we are left to guess most of it. The fairies themselves are actually quite well done, being difficult to both see and converse with. But there is a lack of direction and climax and lots of muddled characters (all the extended family members seem to blur into one, no matter what side of the family they hail from). Astonishly what appears to be an attempted sexual assualt is casually dismissed by Mori and never mentioned again.I did enjoy the commentary on books and the fact that she realises that the Number of the Beast is not classic Heinlein (it was this book that put me off him for the first time) and has to be told about his right wing tendencies (I didn't get that at her age). And I like most of the authors she likes, so I did like thinking "yes, I read that and I liked it too" whenever she mentioned a book I liked.I didn't read any of the Hugo and Nebula award finalists that this book managed to beat, but I have to say that Among Others can't hold a candle to the masterpieces of yesteryear - Le Guin's  The Left Hand Of Darkness  and  The Dispossessed  (both referenced within this book in glowing terms) tower above it.I did see one review mention that this was a YA offering and I can see that might be the case, but it was not mentioned in the publicity or book description and I might have approached with less expectation if I had know this.Ultimately I think there was a missed opportunity here for a clever book about how out imaginations can lead us astray and towards the end I thought the author was about to take that step, but she shied away from it and I was disappointed.3 stars for all the memories and something fairly well imagined and constructed, but no more I'm sad to say. The Left Hand Of DarknessThe Dispossessed

A book about magic that deals with it in such natural terms that it becomes plausible, because it is so unobtrusive. The narrator Morwenna, is one half of a set of twins who through her diary entries, reveals her escape from her mom (and Wales) to live with her estranged dad, Daniel, in England, and her foray into a girls’ boarding school.At the heart of it, lurking in her subconscious, is the demise of her twin, rendered unspeakable and referred to indirectly, and her connection to the fairy folk, mentioned in a non-magical way, which makes the extraordinary ordinary, and perhaps more believable for the lack of fuss with which it is dealt with. Along the way, we learn that her mother is a witch, when a schoolmate asks her about her photos which her mother has burnt the part with her sister away. We know not whether to believe her because prior to this she lets on that her mother may have found her through the things she owns, as if through magic.What anchors the novel in reality is ironically, the narrator's escape into science fiction novels. Morwenna is an avid reader and it is clear that Walton too, is a huge SF fan and many of the books referred to are discussed in some detail, like mini book reviews in their own right. Real authors and real novels that deal with future worlds and alternative realities are strangely juxtaposed against Morwenna's own fantastical (but nonetheless) real world. While this works well, there is a sense of the story lacking a centre and the plot with her sister and mother is constantly deferred in favour of discussion about these SF novels.The writing is inconsistent, with sentences that sound clumsy, and some editing problems where an extra preposition or two interrupts the flow of writing. Quite a surprise for a novel that is so highly regarded. Overall, it was a patchy though interesting work.

Among Others tells the story of Morwenna Phelps. She's a twin whose sister died and she herself was injured in a car accident. She loves to read and specifically she reads SciFi/Fantasy which she devours at a scary and intimidating rate (5+ books a week!). Oh and she sees fairies and can do magic.Which makes it sound more about that than it is. If it's about anything it's about books and stories and how they make you see the world a certain way. It's also about how that can be a refuge. I think the book makes a case for it not being a withdrawal as Mor, as we come to know her, is always really trying "to live" and it's not that she abandons `real life' in favour of books, it's that she has expectations of what life should be that come from books and these expectations cause her to reject certain things about `real life' - things she sees as trivial perhaps.The book is told from her point of view, in fact it comprises her diary for a period from the autumn of 1979 to the end of Feb 1980. This places some of the books she references very specifically in their time.Which is also the right time for when I was growing up and discovering books and SciFi books in particular.A big question that arose for me was whether or not the magic was real. Did she really see fairies or did she merely think she did? Was her mother really a dangerous witch or simply someone with mental health issues? I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the book never steps outside of the point of view of Mor, so that question if it arises for you - and it may not - is left open to interpretation.I enjoyed this book. It's very good on her everyday life. She's been shipped off to an English boarding school and is having trouble fitting in - because she's Welsh, because she reads, because she neither cares about nor can participate in sport. So the sense of a lonely outsider is well drawn. I did feel that she was somewhat `spiky'. I felt I ought to have liked her more, on paper she had a lot of stuff going for her - a tragic back-story, being the outsider, being picked on, being bookish and smart. But I never quite got over the slight sense that she felt herself better than all these other girls who weren't into books and SciFi.Also I found the constant book references slightly irritating only because it was assumed I'd get them without explanation. Most were clear from context but some I had to let pass.As I said though, I did enjoy it. And if you ever felt yourself out of step with others because of a love of books, and especially SciFi/Fantasy then this might well be the book for you.