From the Bookshelf of The Sword and Laser…

Among Others

Jo Walton

Start date: June 1, 2013

Finish date: July 1, 2013

Discussion: 2013 Reads

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 297 topics — 6,650 comments total

2013 Reads

ANHoD: Looking to buy Within the Sanctuary of Wings in Paperback
By Tracey · 6 posts · 42 views

last updated Aug 24, 2018 05:13PM

OMW: BrainPals
By Hershel · 89 posts · 543 views

last updated Apr 07, 2018 02:35PM

showing 10 of 56 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Sep 06, 2011 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it really liked it

Shelves: read2012, audiobook, around-the-world, nebula-winners-or-nominees, location-england, location-wales

I finished this in the car ride to work today, and really enjoyed the Welshish accent of the audiobook. I didn't want to like it but gave up in the end because of the sheer love of reading, interlibrary loan, and book clubs that the author clearly has. (Or in Welsh accent - reeeeadin, enterLIBraaary lowan, and booyk clobs)

The fairy elements seemed beside the point, and obviously Walton wrote this to give her canon of SF, but I still enjoyed it just the same.

ETA: The list of books mentioned with ...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Jul 16, 2012 John Wiswell rated it it was amazing

Among Others is one of the finest pieces of modernLiterary Fiction I’ve found in Fantasy. It’s about a life, not a plot, and is full of short chapters and tangential observations from an idiosyncratic girl, Morwenna. We know her sister died in the same tragedy that crippled her leg, and we know she was taken away from her mother. Whether her mother is an evil witch, though, and whether faeries frequent her favorite woods, are far more questionable, inviting readers to parse Fantasy and from fant Among Others is one of the finest pieces of modernLiterary Fiction I’ve found in Fantasy. It’s about a life, not a plot, and is full of short chapters and tangential observations from an idiosyncratic girl, Morwenna. We know her sister died in the same tragedy that crippled her leg, and we know she was taken away from her mother. Whether her mother is an evil witch, though, and whether faeries frequent her favorite woods, are far more questionable, inviting readers to parse Fantasy and from fantasy while she tries to adjust to a new and quite typical boarding school and deal with the loss of a sister.

Throughout, her experience is wrapped in the authors she reads to pass the time, her deep reverence for Tolkien and Vonnegut shaping how she sees her life. At times it’s like fan service for nerds, reminding us of our first impressions of Zelazny and Heinlein, and that point as which you figured out what Aslan stood for, and in-fights over what is Fantasy and what is SciFi. Walton has fun namedropping books and having her teenager give such short thoughts on classics. She does a better and more entertaining job weaving strains through Morwenna’s consciousness, leaving her wondering if Tolkien saw faeries too (that’s how he wrote such good elves, you see), or wishing not for a group of friends, but a Vonnegutian karass. Other books echo her own experiences, even though their echoes often go over her head.

There’s an open question as to whether magic exists in this book or if you’re in the hands of an unreliable narrator. She’s the only character we meet on-page who sees faeries, with her mother out of the picture and sister deceased. It could all be the fantasy of a lonely girl trying to illuminate a hard and confusing life, or, because her private magic is so frequent, it could be another feature of her life that she keeps to herself. You’re tipped off when she instantly suspects any authority figure she dislikes of using magic to get what they want, when we know people get such things through politics and simpler manipulation. Even Morwenna eventually questions whether her magic is real, and explodes such questions later, fearing a spell cast to gain her friends was really brainwashing that made all of them victims and puppets. One strength of the book is finding intriguing angles on such matters, such as Morwenna’s opinion that magic is about creating causality chains that lead up to your present desire appearing, unverifiable and unscientific, rather than merely conjuring a fireball out of thin air.

Though it’s written plainly, with its most ambitious passages being where she experiments in imitating the writers she adores, there’s much to challenge the typical reader. Among Others is not a traditional book with a plot and goal, or particular stakes. It’s part of what seems like a recent trend in Fantasy to write about lives, which are sometimes tragic or terrifying or hazardous, but not to fixate on shaping them into singular arcs. Morwenna is just a teenager who goes to school, who deals with a handicap and the loss of her sister, who adjusts to a new family life and reads because she has nothing else to do, and so-on. You won’t read it to see her fight her mother to the death in the climax, because that won’t happen; you’ll read it because you’re interested in this girl’s experience of life. It’s entirely worthwhile without most of the traditional beats; you could readily compare its spirit to the Harry Potter books, yet Morwenna doesn’t need an evil wizard to defeat or a secret history to uncover. Her story benefits from just being life as it is. It does not even shape itself to a triumphant romance with a boyfriend or self-discovery as a lesbian or chemist or fighter pilot. She comes out of the book a year older, a year more developed, marked by the sorts of changes most people go through, only filtered through her personality and challenges.

Another challenge is how this fits into the YA-dominated market. Morwenna is fifteen, after all, so you might shelve it as YA. Walton told Publisher’s Weekly that she doesn’t view Among Others as YA, though she didn’t give much of an explanation as to why. I’ll go so far as to say if mainstream YA was like this, I’d read much more of it. Among Others belongs in a class like Golding’s Lord of the Flies and King’s The Body, being utterly unafraid of any topic children actually encounter, and handling it through their perspectives, often in simple terms due to their inexperience and confusion, but never dumbed down to pander to their audience. So our narrator mentions masturbation once in passing, and has an awkward first sexual encounter that ends in two paragraphs, and her father has psychological issues that aren’t plumbed but do appear in the background of several chapters. These are part of the same life as hunting for new books by a favorite author, and watching her father mocked by his oppressive sisters, and the awkwardness of going to a book club for the first time or being accused of cheating on tests. This is robust life for a character who is fifteen, featuring a maturity of approach much YA badly needs. It’s certainly one reason that, when I was a young adult, I only read adult fiction.

There is one bit that I’m still perplexed over, and have come to wonder if it isn’t an error. Midway, Morwenna becomes so terrified that she’ll abuse her magic (and you wonder if she isn’t terrified it isn’t real and she desires to scale it back so as to protect her self-illusion) that she creates an oath to never use it for harm or personal gain. The entry is profound and personal, yet she signs it “Morganna Rachel Phelps Markova” – and “Morganna” is the name of her beloved and deceased sister. I hoped it wasn’t a typo, because it could have led to some amazing wrinkles in the story, but it never amounted to anything in the narrative. I’d love to read theories about any subtle threads this tethers to, yet the novel is obvious to the reader in so many ways that it seems impossible.

The novel benefits from being written so plainly, with a vocabulary largely approachable by any age group. The more challenging the prose is to read, the harder a lower-plot, lower-Fantasy work would be for people to get through. With chapters that so frequently range below 500 words and topics so frequently changing between the few friends she makes, the treatments she gets for her leg, her pursuits and school and struggles with family, there’s a distinct voyeuristic pleasure that pings along to help with the entertainment value. It can be downright gossipy, as a novel posing as a diary usually would be. Behind the gossip is a heart, though, and an honesty about trivia and trauma. Perhaps the greatest magic trick of Among Others is making everything seem so simple.
...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Dec 24, 2010 kvon rated it it was amazing

It's a fairy story about a young woman who likes science fiction. It's a fantasy told in the far away lands of Wales and England in the 1970s (how far away? Sony Walkmen were the newest thing.) There are many anti-Potter elements--the girl, who is not orphaned but distanced from her parents, goes from a magical land to an unmagical boarding school that she dislikes, and she's bad at sports and making friends but excellent in studies and reading. She gushes intelligently about all the science fic ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Aug 11, 2012 Brittany rated it really liked it

Shelves: yafantasy

I just realized this is the 800th book I’ve read, as tracked by Goodreads. How appropriate, then, that it incorporated so many of my other dearly beloved books, mostly from adolescence.

Like millions (billions?) of people on the planet, I love The Lord of the Rings. But as a child my favorite part was, not the battles, not the ents (though yes, the ents), not the elves or Rivendell, but the parts that happened after the final battle, The Greening of the Shire especially. There was lots of story ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Nov 28, 2012 travelgirlut rated it liked it

This book had two parts for me: a fairly interesting story about a girl who sees fairies and can do magic, and a long, exhausting list of science fiction books. I have read A LOT of sci-fi and I still got lost amongst the constant references to books I've never read. The main character would refer to how a situation was like one in a book, but then would never explain how so that those of us who haven't read the book would know why.

On the story side I kind of felt like there were too many obscur ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Feb 25, 2011 Joanna rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy

I wanted to liked this so much more than I actually did. And honestly, I'd probably give it 2.5 stars so I'm being generous. I knew very little about it going in. Turns out it's a coming of age story a la A Separate Peace, in diary form of a Welsh girl going to a boarding school who happens to be obsessed with sci fi books. Like the main character, I grew up rather lonely and obsessed with books (especially fantasy/scifi). You would think this would be enough for me to love the book, but I felt ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Nov 19, 2009 Clarice rated it it was amazing

Shelves: at-the-library, 2011, recommended-women-writers, recommended-women-mc

This goes in the same pile as Tam Lin and Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary by Pamela Dean, and 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff as a growing-up-loving-books kind of book. Although the main character here is more focused on being a sci-fi loving girl growing up in the late 70s rather than having focus on only the classics, it's still really enjoyable (probably because I was a sci-fi loving girl growing up in the 80s-90s etc).

The five stars are probably due to my love of books. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 15, 2013 Shannon rated it really liked it

Among Others is about a geek girl shaped by the science fiction and the fantasy books she reads. She also talks to fairies, struggles against her evil witch (literally) of a mother, and searches to find her a place in a world that's not really set up for people like her. She's different—Othered—along a number of separate axes: disabled, geeky, a survivor of abuse, and that's not even getting started with the witch thing. Yet her inner voice is intensely relatable. It's funny how she's given a nu ...more

Like · see review

Jan 18, 2011 Andrea rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, boarding-school

This book was told in a journal style, and it sort of contained three narratives: the day to day activities of the main character, Morwenna, a Welsh teenager in an English boarding school; Mori's reactions to the tons of books that she is reading in the late 70s, almost all science fiction and fantasy, or as she lumps them together SF; and her remembrance of and dealing with a recent tragedy, the loss of her twin and becoming disabled in some kind of magical battle with her insane mother, who is ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 12, 2011 Chad rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2011-finished

First Impression:

Among Others felt like a meandering book that prioritized character development over plot. Nothing wrong with that.

After Reflection:

Among Others has a very well-developed narrator, but the beauty of this book is in its hidden plot. I don't want to give it away, but what I love about this book is the fact that, after reading it, I feel like I need to scrutinize every decision the narrator made. The smallest decision, one that wouldn't be part of the plot in any other book, becom ...more

Like · see review

Apr 07, 2011 dennis rated it really liked it

a really interesting story, told through diary entries. unfortunately the end came up rather quickly and could've used a better wrap-up. only reason i didn't give this 5 stars. ...more

Like · see review