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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunningly wonderful book, February 16, 2011
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.
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical, January 22, 2011
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.
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31 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Raised by books, January 21, 2011
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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