With a deft hand and a blazing imagination, fantasy writer Walton mixes genres to great effect. Elements of fantasy, science fiction, and coming-of-age novels combine into one superlative literary package that will appeal to a variety of readers across age levels. After engaging in a classic good-magic-versus-bad-magic battle with her mother that fatally wounds her twin sister, 15-year-old Morwenna leaves Wales and attempts to reconnect with her estranged father. She was sent to boarding school in England, and her riveting backstory unfolds gradually as she records her thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a series of journal entries.
Jo Walton’s Among Others is an absolutely charming book. Despite the fact that there are some magical things happening this isn’t a fantasy novel. It is a novel about fantasy and SF and, if anything, I would call it magical realism. What is charming about this book is not the magic, which is raw, wild and dangerous but Morwenna’s voice and her love of books, reading and libraries.
Morwenna’s story unfolds in a series of diary entries. The year is 1979 and Morwenna has just arrived at and English boarding school. She is a 15-year-old girl from Wales whose twin sister has died in an accident. The very same accident has left her injured and crippled. As we learn in the novel the accident was the result of their evil mother’s doing. The girls tried to stop her from getting more power through magic and that’s how the accident happened.
Morwenna is an outsider at her new school. She is crippled and the only one from Wales. But that isn’t the only thing that makes her an outsider. She knows that she is different. Her mother is a witch. Morwanna only just met her father whose sisters are witches as well, she sees and talks to faeries and she is addicted to reading SF novels. Novels are her consolation.
“It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”
Books are her escape route but also her way to make sense of the world. Her enthusiasm and love for books is one of the most important elements in this novel. At the boarding school she discovers what libraries have to offer, is introduced to inter library loan which opens the world for her even more and finally she is invited to a SF book club. Once a week she will discuss all her favourite SF and fantasy writers and learn about new books and authors and go on reading her new discoveries in her spare time.
I sat on the bench by the willows and ate my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside of the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
At the book club she meets Tim a gorgeously beautiful boy with a bad reputation. It’s for her to discover whether it is founded or not.
I haven’t read a lot of SF and although I knew the names, I hardly knew any of the books still it was captivating to read about them, to see what elements she picked for her life, what themes, questions and speculations fascinated her.
The voice of Morwenna is very well rendered. This sounds like a young girl discovering the world and new books. We follow her thoughts and see how they develop, how wrong assumptions are corrected, how new things are learned.
The magical parts can be read in many different ways. A sceptical reader could just assume that it is all in Morwenna’s imagination. That grief, sadness and the constant pain she is in lead her to fantasize. It would make sense as well. If you are less sceptical you can just accept the fact, that, yes, she does see fairies and has an evil witch mother. The fairies are very interesting beings and she also mentions that they have nothing in common with Tolkien’s elves. Some of them look like gnomes, others are very beautiful. They are tied to places and seem like some sort of condensed energy.
A part that spoke to me is, the description of Morwenna’s pain. The descrptions were very realistic. The way chronic pain changes, how she tries to handle it, the cures that are provided, the wrong therapy she gets from conventional doctors and how she finally gets better through acupuncture.
Jo Walton lives in Canada but she is from Wales. The differnce between Wales and England is emphasized all through the novel. Half of the French side of my family is from Brittany. The difference to the rest of France is very similar. And you also find a lot of magical beliefs in Brittany. I grew up believing in loup-garous (werewolves) and nobody would have made me go out during a full moon when we were on holidays in Morlaix.
Amon Others is a very unusual coming of age story and I’m glad I read about it on Gavin’s blog (here is her post). I can’t imagine that anyone who loves books wouldn’t be able to relate to the intense love of reading that is capured in this book.
Beauty is a Sleeping Cat 
I love the sound of this–particularly since I don’t read hardly any SF–it seems like a nice way to get the sense of it without it being a straightforward SF novel. I’ve already noted it down and have it on my library wishlist!
I was really thinking of you when I read this and thought you would like it. The way she describes someone who loves books so much, is something we can all relate to. I haven’t read a lot of SF but I enjoyed reading about the books. Morwenna is such an endearing character.
The narrative voice really is spot on. Such a beautiful book – definitely one of my favourite reads of the year so far.
Yes, it’s a real beauty. That girl does come to life on the page.
Thanks so much for the link. Being a SF/Fantasy fan I now find myself going back and rereading some of the books mentioned in Among Others.
You are welcome, I’m glad I read your review. I knew many of the fanatsy authors but hardly any of the SF books but felt tempted to at least try the one or the other. I can imagine if, on top everything else, you like SF, this book is even more amazing.
I’ve heard only good things about this book! Thanks for the review!
You are welcome. I’d be curious to see whether you like it too as well. It is one of those books that I wanted to lend to a lot of people while reading.
What an interesting and unusual sounding book! I’m definitely going to have a further look at it on amazon now.
I’m so glad if I managed to spread the word… I thought it was quite a discovery and enjoyed it a lot.
It definitely sounds interesting, Caroline. I’m not into SF at all, but I do like magical realism occasionally. Thanks for sharing.
You are welcome. I have a feeling that many just read the blurb and think “That’s not for me”, while I think that this is a novel for people who don’t like genere fiction (of any kind) as well as for those who like literary fiction, plus atouch of magic is just wonderful. Only if you don’t want to read any coming of age stories, then you’d have to stay away from it. I don’t understand why one wouldn’t though. I like this sort of breathless awe that’s in the story of a young person discovering the world.
a book about someone who loves reading is indeed interesting for us, bookworm.
is SF stand for sci-fi? it confuses me a little because it doesn’t sound scientific to me.
I can totally relate to that girl. When I am reading a fastinating book, I tend to forget about everything around me. I am there in the book. That’s why I find it difficult to read a book that uses ‘I’ for different characters…that kind of book makes me difficult to relate with one of the characters
SF stands for science-fiction, yes. A gnre I’m not so familiar with but it seems well worth discovereing after all I read in this book.
I think you would probabyl like this one. It captures the love for book so weel, the door tey open to other worlds, the conslation and the things you learn.
I know what you meaa about the shifting of the first person narrative but I don’t think it bothers me so much but I also prefer one narrator. I often have a problem with books that switch from one time period to the next and back again, changing for every chapter.
This is one I’ve had on my tbr list for ages. Will have to bump it up a couple of spots I think.
I hope you will like it as much as I did. It’s so special. I’ll be curious to read whether there are any similarities with I Capture the Castle. It’s one of the rare non-SF novels she reads.