Among Others Review

This week's book is Among Others by Jo Walton.

This is a story about Mori, a Welsh girl who sees fairies, does magic, and saved the world from her evil witch mother, but now has to make do in a magicless English boarding school.  Alternatively, it's the story of a girl dealing with trauma after a car accident crippled her leg and killed her twin sister by burying herself in magical explanations and science fiction/fantasy novels from the 70s.

Intrinsic in this is the question of if the magic is real or not.  I fall on the side that her belief is a coping mechanism.  It's something she used to do with her sister, and they were on a magic quest when her sister died.  There are points when people other than her can see the fairies, but by those points in the novel I don't trust her to be a reliable narrator whose delusions are starting to affect her daily life.  Instead of being frustrating, this feels like a second layer over the story.  Reading between the lines, we can tell that this is an image she's created of herself, and we can extrapolate the reasons she needs to see herself and her world like that, and through that we can tell what happened.

The magic Mori describes is unusual and fits well with the themes of the book.  Magic is "deniable" and "isn't like in books."  This means that if Mori does a spell to make the bus come right when she wants it, the magic will go into the past and change a dozen people's daily schedules so they catch the bus at different times to make it so the bus comes right when she needs it.  The observable effects of this is that she would do a spell and the bus would come around the corner.  So it's impossible to tell if the magic worked, or if the magic did nothing and coincidentally the bus came.

This deniability gets interesting when Mori is so lonely that she does a spell to get herself a karass (a group of people linked in a cosmically significant way, or in other words a friend group.)  The next day the librarian tells her she should come to the science fiction/fantasy book club.  Then she starts to question the ethics of magic.  Would the book club people still like her if she hadn't done the spell?  Is anything about the relationships she forges real?  Did the spell even work or is this coincidence?  She lets it eat her up inside.  I, of course, see this as her delusions getting in the way of her life, and holding her back from making friends.

The novel is written as a diary, and boy howdy is it ever a fifteen-year-old girl diary.  Walton does a great job capturing the narcissism, overreaction, and catastrophizing of being a teenager.   At one point I thought, "Mori's going to read this passage later and be embarrassed."

 The other thing that needs a mention are the books.  Mori reads like nobody's business and spends a lot of time talking about books.  She frames her life around books, to the point where she assumes that when people agree with her it's because they've read the same book she used to base her opinion.  If they disagree with her, they obviously haven't read that book.  It's kind of a treat when she mentions something I've read, but her opinions about them are so painfully fifteen-year-old girl opinions.  I've seen this book described as "a love letter to science fiction/fantasy," but I think a more accurate description is "a love letter to discovering science fiction/fantasy as a teenager."

But then, it could get confusing if you haven't read what she's talking about.  She references concepts from books without explanation or context and uses them to make points. For example: did you know what a karass is?  If not, you should ignore this whole review and go read Cat's Cradle, but also you'd probably be wondering what Mori's on about, becasue she doesn't explain it until towards the end of the book.  I see this again as part of the teen girl thing and being wrong about how universal your experience is (or about the diary aspect).  But at the same time, I can see how both the teen girl part and the unfamiliar allusions she drops could get frustrating.

There are also moments of Not Okay that Mori doesn't give the emotional weight they deserve.  She doesn't let these moments alter her relationships with Not Okay People.  Maybe that's part of her mindset while she's not thinking about painful things, but it was really unsettling for me as a reader.


This book took a lot of leaps and managed a lot of technical aspects that made all the themes hang together beautifully.  But I don't think I liked it.

***

Next week: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman.