Among Others as a novel by Jo Walton originally published back in 2011, but has recently gotten some extra attention thanks to it getting a new print edition. Personally, I'm really excited about that fact. I've loved Jo Walton ever since I was a teenager, and yet I never read this book. Talk about a great chance to dive back into the works of somebody you adore!

Morwenna Phelps, aka Mori, is a girl who lived in two worlds. The real world, and the world created for her through her greatest love: books. Mori is a girl very much in need of an escape. She may have her mother's gift to see magic and fairies, but that has never saved her from the darker things in life. Nor did it ever offer her the escape from reality that she so desperately craved.

“There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.”

Among Others is an utterly enchanting read. Mori is a fascinating character, and her love of books makes her both approachable and all the more endearing. It opens up her world, and thus her narrative.

This book was everything that I needed it to be. It's ironic, really. Mori's escape was found in books (something we can all sympathize with, I'm sure), and I found an escape in her novel. Her story was not what I expected, but it was brilliant nonetheless.

There was a lot to enjoy about this book, not least of which is the way the story unfolded. There was this constant sense of intrigue, thanks to all of the past that had yet been revealed. It added a sense of tension to the story. Something that worked nicely in balance with the adoration of novels expressed.

Speaking of, Jo Walton did not shy away from talking about books. Mori didn't love imaginary books. She loved real books – books that we all have access to today. That was refreshing. It was so much fun seeing books I loved referenced within these pages. It made Mori's world come to life, which I'm sure was the intention.

Regardless, Among Others was an absolutely delightful read. I'm so incredibly happy that this novel got another print run, because I somehow managed to completely miss it the first time around. I'm glad that my mistake has now been rectified.

Jo Walton is a good deal smarter than me, and better read. She's also about three years older, as is her narrator/diarist in this book, Mori - clearly based quite strongly on her own teenage self. So I wasn't reading all the same books as Mori at the same time, and I haven't read all of the ones she mentions, though like her I was a huge Lord of the Rings fan as a teenager (and a huge Roger Zelazny fan, eventualy, though I came to him much later). Like her, too, I found the comparison to "Tolkien at his best" on the cover of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant grounds for suspicion, though unlike her I did read them. She complains about the limitations of her school library, but between that and the local library I think she probably had access to a wider variety than I did at the same age; also, our tastes differ somewhat.

There's a lot of literary reference here, including the use of invented terminology from one novel (Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle) which I don't think I've read - or if I have, it was when I was about Mori's age, and I've forgotten it. Because there were so many references to books I wasn't familiar with - because Mori's world was so much built of the fantasy and SF available at the end of the 1970s - parts of this book were lost on me, and I think that will be a common experience, since few people are so well read as Mori/Jo in that literature and, if they are, have quite likely not read the books recently.

The books of that era tended to speculate about different ways for people to be in community, rather than, like many contemporary books, speculating about different ways for people to live as individuals (it's a matter of emphasis, and I won't fight you about it if you disagree). Because, again, Mori lives so much in the world of books, a lot of her thinking is formed by them; her view of sexuality is almost entirely out of Heinlein and his contemporaries, which is probably not a great model, and she has a bit of difficulty with it in practice.

But none of this is the really important thing, which is that in this version of Jo Walton's childhood, she (or rather Mori) can see fairies, and do magic, and she was disabled and her twin sister killed when they prevented their witch mother from becoming a Dark Queen. And since Mori, despite her matter-of-factness, reads as an unreliable narrator, I spent much of the book in two minds about whether she was engaging in an elaborate self-delusion following a terrible trauma, or whether these aspects were real. She emphasizes that magic is "deniable"; you can always come up with a reason why something happened naturally that you were trying to make happen with magic, because you can see the chain of cause and effect, but that chain is itself the effect of the magic. She is deeply worried, when she finds a group of like-minded SFF fans, that she has magically manipulated them into liking her, or perhaps even into existing, and swears off magic except for prevention of harm (which does her credit, ethically).

The magic gets less deniable, less plausibly a self-delusion, towards the end of the book, and a book that began as very much a diary with character development and events, but not really more of a plot than real life has, turns into a story by the end. I feel like I would have liked it more if it hadn't, if it had stayed ambiguous throughout; but I could be wrong.

The gradual backstory reveal works well, though, and is well paced. I related very much to the image of an intelligent teenager who reads a lot and doesn't fit in and cares more about people in books than the people who are part of their real life (though I was fortunate enough to have two excellent friends at my school, something that Mori doesn't have; she has to find them outside).

It's a bravura performance by someone very clever, but at the same time it feels like it's not sure what it wants to be - which is also accurate to the teenage experience, of course. The mundane details of boarding-school life and teenage drama are told with an insightful depth of observation that transposes them into a higher key, and the fantastical backstory would also make a great book by itself, but the two of them together felt at odds sometimes. It's the fantastical that wins, and, as I said, I'm not fully convinced that it ought to have. So I'm left with: it's brilliant, and, indeed, brill, but for me it lacks the clarity that it needs in order to be truly amazing. Four stars, not five.

I'd still read another Jo Walton in a heartbeat, and indeed I've asked for another from Netgalley (which is where I got my review copy).

What a magical (in multiple senses), captivating, engrossing, lyrical, poetic, superbly-written delight! 25 stars for this gem! I have not been so thrilled with a story since I read “I Capture the Castle.” I am now a total convert to the writings of Jo Walton, and plan to catch up on all I have unfortunately missed.


In a contemporary society where magic exists, fairies are real, magic is a useful (or sometimes not) tool-some folks know it and use it; some know but avoid it; and most folks just don’t know and can’t see and wouldn’t believe. Twins Morwenna and Morgana Phelps are the gifted daughters of a witch who is insane as well as magically powerful. She wants to be “the dark queen,” ruling the world, and the fairies of South Wales have enlisted the twins to halt her progress-with dire results.


Simultaneously fantasy, coming of age memoir (for it is written in the form of diary entries, in a very special fashion which makes it all mesh together winningly), process-of-maturation tale, witchcraft, magic, fairy, ghosts, the dead, English boarding school, Welsh culture, train journey, new romance-and tons and tons of wonderful explication of science fiction, because our heroine loves her books above all.


I don’t remember ever reading a book in which the author so well “wrote out my life.” I am reminded of those lines from the song “Killing Me Softly”: “I felt he had found my letters and read them all out loud.” What an absolutely incredible book is “Among Others.”