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Among Others Hugo Award Winner Best Novel edition by Jo Walton Literature Fiction eBooks

Download As PDF : Among Others Hugo Award Winner Best Novel edition by Jo Walton Literature Fiction eBooks

Among Others Hugo Award Winner Best Novel edition by Jo Walton Literature Fiction eBooks

This was an unusual book for me to read and enjoy. I'd had a few disappointments in the recreational reading dimension and, thinking that at least it would be well-written, decided to try a Hugo Award Winner. So I searched for some on Amazon and decided on this book.

The story takes place in contemporary UK. The protagonist is a fifteen year old schoolgirl from Wales who sometimes "sees fairies" and has a nodding acquaintance with, but decidedly mixed feelings about, magic. She's bright and, perhaps somewhat unrealistically sensible & kind, though not so much as to be off-putting. And the author does at least acknowledge and provide justification for the character's traits.

Due to a near-fatal automobile accident, the main character limps badly and is in constant pain. She needs a cane to get around, has a hard time getting out of chairs, etc. She's not particularly pretty, but she's not homely either. Also, she's in a ritzy boarding school, and many of the other girls pinch her, try to trip her, call her things like "hop-a-long," you know the drill: she's an outsider. At the same time, she's one of the top students in the school and she wins awards for her "house" (is that the right word?) so she's also respected. Oh, and she loves reading -- especially science fiction, so there's a lot of discussion *about* Sci Fi and, to a lesser extent, Fantasy.

The story takes place in the months after the first anniversary of her accident. There are some weird family members, some quirky and fun; others quirky and not so fun; a few just plain mean. Really, it seems to be the story, told in an odd (but also, to me, oddly appealing) way of this girl coping w/ her physical situation and moving on with her life. Her love of SF turns out to be a good path for her.

Apart from the bits about magic and fairies, which sometimes seemed almost incidental, this could be be a work of general fiction rather than fantasy. By that I mean the supernatural aspects usually take a back seat to "real life." In fact, I spent much of the book trying to decide whether or not she was sane and/or whether she had a grasp of reality. If that was the intent, then Walton handled that aspect of the story very well.

At any rate, I found the novel to be engaging and well worth my time. And due to all the discussion of science fiction and fantasy books in the story, I ended up with a good list of new things to explore. As always, your mileage may vary.


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Among Others Hugo Award Winner Best Novel edition by Jo Walton Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews

If you've read and enjoyed other Jo Walton novels, be prepared for something different, but excellent nonetheless. This is the story of a girl in turmoil after the death of her identical twin sister, severe injury, and estrangement from her sister. She ends up in a boarding school, literally among others as she is as different from anyone there as you can be, while remaining a teenage girl. She finds ways to no only survive, but thrive and triumph thought will, wit, and character. She is an avid reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy, so readers in those genres will see many references to things they've read, and perhaps some they haven't.
"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.
This was an unusual book for me to read and enjoy. I'd had a few disappointments in the recreational reading dimension and, thinking that at least it would be well-written, decided to try a Hugo Award Winner. So I searched for some on and decided on this book.

The story takes place in contemporary UK. The protagonist is a fifteen year old schoolgirl from Wales who sometimes "sees fairies" and has a nodding acquaintance with, but decidedly mixed feelings about, magic. She's bright and, perhaps somewhat unrealistically sensible & kind, though not so much as to be off-putting. And the author does at least acknowledge and provide justification for the character's traits.

Due to a near-fatal automobile accident, the main character limps badly and is in constant pain. She needs a cane to get around, has a hard time getting out of chairs, etc. She's not particularly pretty, but she's not homely either. Also, she's in a ritzy boarding school, and many of the other girls pinch her, try to trip her, call her things like "hop-a-long," you know the drill she's an outsider. At the same time, she's one of the top students in the school and she wins awards for her "house" (is that the right word?) so she's also respected. Oh, and she loves reading -- especially science fiction, so there's a lot of discussion *about* Sci Fi and, to a lesser extent, Fantasy.

The story takes place in the months after the first anniversary of her accident. There are some weird family members, some quirky and fun; others quirky and not so fun; a few just plain mean. Really, it seems to be the story, told in an odd (but also, to me, oddly appealing) way of this girl coping w/ her physical situation and moving on with her life. Her love of SF turns out to be a good path for her.

Apart from the bits about magic and fairies, which sometimes seemed almost incidental, this could be be a work of general fiction rather than fantasy. By that I mean the supernatural aspects usually take a back seat to "real life." In fact, I spent much of the book trying to decide whether or not she was sane and/or whether she had a grasp of reality. If that was the intent, then Walton handled that aspect of the story very well.

At any rate, I found the novel to be engaging and well worth my time. And due to all the discussion of science fiction and fantasy books in the story, I ended up with a good list of new things to explore. As always, your mileage may vary.