skygiants | Entries tagged with jo walton

I read Jo Walton's My Real Children for book club last month, which many people who know me in real life now know because I briefly acquired a bad habit of going around saying things like "well, I've made my decision and ideally it won't accidentally lead to nuclear war!"

My Real Children follows a woman named Patricia Cowan through two alternate timelines: one in which she marries a dude named Mark when he asks her, and one in which she doesn't.

Personally, marrying Mark is definitely a mistake, because Mark is an asshole -- which is not to say that Trish's life is miserable forever because she made a mistake, but, you know, there's a significant period of misery time in there. On the other hand, the world in which Trish marries Mark is, on a global scale, significantly better than the world in which Pat dumps Mark and finds True Love with a woman (Bee) and a city (Florence) and is generally very happy with her personal choices; Pat's world is even more deeply messed up than our current one, in a hundred small and large ways that do and don't affect Pat and her overall wonderful family life. How exactly these changes to world history have come about is not necessarily clear or obvious.

In both worlds she has children, and loves them, with some complications.

(In the Pat-and-Bee world, the father of their children is a secular Jewish guy who said a couple things that made me put the book down and side-eye it for a minute -- "I'm Jewish, of course I speak Hebrew;" dude, you are a secular Jew! in England! there is no 'of course' there! -- but this is a relatively minor caveat.)

Mostly it's a relatively straightforward narrative of two different lives lived differently, by someone who starts out as the same person, but is arguably not by the end. Sad things happen, because sad things eventually happen in every life. There are small tragedies and large tragedies, and people get old, and people die. Things are terrible for some people and don't affect others. A whole city gets wiped off the map, but if you're not in the country where it happens, then, I mean ... it's sad, but you get on with things .........? (Which is the sort of thing Jo Walton has always excelled at, how it's possible to live a perfectly normal life around fairly terrible things.)

( Spoiler for the end )

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/447703.html

It's always a strange experience reading books that talk directly to the girl I was at fifteen, because I remember quite a lot about that girl and there are many ways in which I don't like her much now. Jo Walton's new book Among Others is very much a book that talks directly to that girl, and I think it's honestly pretty brilliant, and there are a number of people I want to give it to. But I also think I'm glad I didn't have it at fifteen; I wouldn't have had any objectivity then. I don't think the book really is saying that the only genuine way to connect with anyone is through sff books, that the only people worth talking to about anything are people who can talk about books - but Mori, the protagonist, believes it, and at fifteen I probably believed it too. At fifteen I also didn't see anything wrong with the way Janet thinks about Christina sometimes in Tam Lin - it's like that.

I'm getting ahead of myself though. Okay, so the book is about Welsh twins called Morganna and Morwenna, who live with their evil mother and occasionally have matter-of-fact interactions with mysterious creatures they call fairies. Except that's wrong, because for most of the book there's only one twin, the other having been killed in an event that involved the fairies and their mother. The remaining twin has gotten away from their mother, but that's gotten her stuck with the father and relatives she's never met, who send her off to boarding school, where she does well in everything except math and makes herself odd enough that the other, boring girls will be afraid of her, and reads books, because as long as she has books everything's bearable. Some of them she's borrowed from her father, who might not be of much practical use but at the very least reads SF and that's something.

The book is Mori's journal, and Mori's mostly interested in talking about books, but of course you can find out a lot from what someone says about books. Sometimes she talks about the fairies and sometimes she talks about her family and the whole thing sort of starts to take shape into a plot that might be about grief and about growing up into an independent person and about finding the people you want to connect with. And also sort of about fairies and about responsible ways to use power and about how not to grow up to be a wicked witch. Ish.

Mori's growing up about twenty years before me, and I was never much on hard SF, so I probably only knew about a quarter or a third of the books that she's reading and mostly wasn't having the same reaction to them - okay, well, I was to the Anne McCaffrey (oh, Mori, someday you will look back at that and facepalm so hard) but definitely not the Heinlein. And Mori is much more isolated than I was, and needs the books more - I might not have always had someone to talk specifically about the fantasy books I was reading with when I was younger, and I wanted that desperately when I didn't have it, but I always had someone. But all the same, if you were at all that kid, you'll recognize this, and this book will have something to say to you.

If you weren't that kid, though - if this doesn't really sound familiar - I wouldn't recommend this; I think it would actually be profoundly alienating. Because I don't think Mori has quite yet gotten around to recognizing that people who don't have the same inner life she does may still very well have an inner life. There are hints that she's on the way to figuring out that's not true, but she's not there yet.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/237256.html

genarti asked me for my top five favorite book covers! She gave me full reign to be ironic in my love, which is a privilege I will try not to abuse. At least 50% of these will also be rooted in fond nostalgia rather than any artistic merit, so . . . you are warned? I also stretch the definition of 'top five' a little, you are also warned.

( Lots of images under the cut, obviously! )

What about you guys? Favorite covers? Notoriously terrible covers that you have braved to find the gold within? Or, alternately, covers that should justly have been a warning to you?

I made matzoh ball soup (from a box, because it was late and I was lazy) the other night.

Hot soup was a delicious and tasty meal for a cold Tuesday night, but I think the actual reason that I had a craving for matzoh ball soup on that particular night was because I had just finished reading Jo Walton's Half a Crown, the conclusion to her series of books set in an AU fascist-leaning post-WWII England. The book includes a scene of a Jewish family celebrating a Passover seder through the eyes of a young British debutante: "It isn't that they sacrifice babies," she says, "and they're clean enough to put us all to shame. But their customs are very peculiar, and all their prayers are in Hebrew, and they wear robes and have strange rituals in their houses in the evening. I'm not surprised that people get nervous about them and wonder what they're up to. I felt nervous myself."

As far as I'm concerned it's the best-done scene in the book.

(One year when I was fourteen or fifteen we went to celebrate Passover with my great-grandmother, who lived in Nottingham at that time but was born in Czechoslovakia at the turn of the nineteenth century. Over and over again she warned us not to let the neighbors see us carrying the matzoh and other seder implements to her house - just in case.)

I don't know. I grew up, as I think I have said here before, in an area that was packed with Jews of all varieties, Orthodox and Conservative and reform and secular; my high school was around sixty percent Jewish, and we got all the Jewish holidays off, and the Saturday morning organic chemistry classes didn't factor into our transcript grade-wise because it wouldn't be fair to the kids who couldn't attend for religious reasons. Every year, the local Borders puts up an enormous cheesy tinsel menorah on the side of the building.

And more and more, I realize how incredibly privileged I have been and how much it has affected my life and my sense of self to grow up where I did. I can't remember ever feeling strange or different for being Jewish when I was growing up, and it's hard to think of myself as othered at all, even now. But as I get older, I learn some of the things I missed - the woman who said "that's what happens when Jews stand under the Christmas tree" when my baby brother was hit by a falling bough; the au pair who wondered in all innocence, when I came home from a winter vacation with a burn from standing too close to the radiator, whether Jews branded their children. (I am writing seriously about these stories now, but in the interests of full disclosure you should really know that when my brother and I talk about them, we're invariably cracking up; it feels so absurd to us that it becomes hilarious.)

And I think, every so often, it's good to be reminded that just because I don't often think of myself as othered, as standing out, as being different - the people who hear me talking about going home for Yom Kippur, or making matzoh ball soup for myself for dinner, won't necessarily agree.

- and after that long digression, my thoughts about the book itself! ( Under a spoiler-cut, because everything I want to say I think is massively spoilery for either the book itself or the earlier ones. )

Booklogging! I . . . am a fair bit behind. Fortunately I am reading a fairly long book now, which ought to give me some time to catch up.

Anyways, I think it was last week that I finished Jo Walton's The King's Peace and The King's Name, which were recommended to me by

genarti, whose advice tends to be worth taking! And this time was no exception.

The books are quite clearly based off of Arthuriana - the titular King is named Urdo, and his goal is to unite a country that is not-quite-historical-Britain - but instead of the not-quite-Britain that you usually get in Arthurian sagas, that involves tremendous anachronisms and a lot of going 'lalala' at historic detail, this is a not-quite-Britain that uses the very complex dynamics of the different groups on the island at the time to great effect. (Nothing against the 'lalala' kind of pseudo-Britain! I am often very fond of it! But it has been done a lot, and this is something quite different.)

The story is told by Sulien, Urdo's right-hand warrior; while I generally love first-person narration if well-done, and this was certainly well-done, I found that in this case it had its benefits and its drawbacks. Sulien's a good character in her own right, and her voice is strong and consistent - but it's the sort of story with all kinds of things going on around the edges that I wanted to know much more about than Sulien was interested in telling me. I would have dived on a chance to see things from the perspective of Urdo's cranky priest Raoul, for example, or confused Gawain-analogue Angas. (Also, I sometimes had a hard time keeping track of who the various other characters were. And I wanted to know who they were! Because they were interesting!) In general terms, though, I really liked the way Jo Walton decided to play with Arthurian legend. For one thing: NO LOVE TRIANGLE \o/. (Well, sort of. But not really.) The Guinevere-figure herself was a lot more interesting than most of Guineveres tend to be, and the religious aspect was well-done too. It was a complex and interesting world, and one I very much wanted to know more about, even if I found the perspective sort of limiting at times; I didn't love it the same way I do Walton's Farthing books, but I think that has more to do with me and my preferences than with the books themselves.

A little while back,

gramarye1971 posted a very good discussion of the problems that she has with AU history, or counterfactual history, and she makes a lot of really excellent points.

But there's one thing that counterfactual history can do that historical fiction (or contemporary fiction, for that matter) can't. Once the initial conceit has been set up, the wonderful thing about AU history - if the author knows what they're doing - is that the history can go on to be changed. Apparently small things can alter the world; any outcome is possible.

Obviously, the same holds true for fantasy or sci-fi, which may be why I enjoy those genres so much. But there's something about a world that's very close to our own, but not quite, that lends the potential for change an immediacy and a relevance that isn't always quite there when the world of the fiction is one entirely removed from our own. I think that's one of the reasons I found Jo Walton's Ha'Penny so difficult to put down, once I'd started it. I liked Farthing, the first book in the series, a lot, but for me, Ha'Penny was even more compelling. Farthing created the universe and then altered the political circumstances of the world as it set it up, but in Ha'Penny the reader knows what's going on as much or more than the characters do, which for me put the focus and the excitement of the book on the potential for change.

. . . and in terms of personal points of interest, it didn't hurt that half the plot of this book focused around an actress whose family was clearly based off the Mitford sisters, who are crazy and fascinating in and of themselves, playing the lead in a really cool gender-switched production of Hamlet.

( Spoilers for Farthing under the cut. )

Basically, I am now looking forward to the third like crazy.

Sooner or later I will catch up on my booklogging and stop spamming you guys.

This one, though, I do really want to talk about and recommend, so: Jo Walton's Farthing, which I had seen highly recommended in a number of places, and therefore picked up to read on my trip.

The plot starts out as basically a British country-house mystery with a political turn - a politician is found dead in his room after a house-party, with a Jewish star pinned to his chest - that is soon revealed to be set in an alternate-history universe where Great Britain and Germany came to a wary truce instead of continuing to fight. However, it reads more subtly than many alternate histories, I think, because it focuses mostly on its main characters and uses them to demonstrate the changes in the world, rather than getting carried away by the Difference of the World Itself.

I don't know enough about British political history to know how plausible the specific changes are, but the world worked for me; I like it especially because it's not the big dramatic ZOMG THEY KILLED HITLER or ZOMG HITLER WON OH NOES, but something in-between that's much more unnerving and believable. I also really liked the voices of the characters, especially Lucy, who narrates half the book in first-person (the other half is close third person following the inspector who is investigating the case). She's the daughter of an extremely influential family who has incurred their disapproval by marrying a Jewish man; she's babbly and cheerful and apparently oblivious, but with strong depths of reasonable practicality, and, yeah, I really like her. Not that this is predictable of me or anything.

The one criticism I would make: we see a lot of the effect of the alternate history as regards religious, political, and sexual discrimination, but aside from a brief mention of African colonies, other discriminated-against groups and countries outside of Europe and North America that would have been affected aren't mentioned. It makes sense in terms of the focus of the story, but I would have liked to see more, all the same. I will most definitely be picking up the sequel, though, and if anyone else has read the book, I would love to hear your thoughts.