Among Others
by Jo Walton
Summary
Morwenna Phelps is fifteen, Welsh, walks with a stick, and has been sent to an English boarding school she loathes, having run from a mother who practises magic and having lost her twin sister in whatever happened when the two of them stopped her. She writes it all down in a diary through 1979 and 1980.
What she does at school is read. She reads Zelazny, Delany, Heinlein, Le Guin, Tiptree and Silverberg, borrows constantly from the library, joins a science fiction reading group at the local library, and argues with all of it on the page. Roughly a third of the novel is a fifteen year old's running commentary on the science fiction of the 1970s, which is either the best thing about it or an obstacle, depending entirely on whether you have read those books.
The magic is deliberately unfalsifiable. Mori sees fairies in the ruins of the Welsh industrial valleys and works spells that change the past so thoroughly that nobody, including the reader, can prove anything happened. The book is quite serious that this is what magic would be like.
It is short, told in diary entries, quiet, and about grief and finding your people much more than about a confrontation, though one does come.
The school sections are exact about the particular loneliness of being clever, disabled and poor in an institution built for none of those things, and about how much a single sympathetic librarian can change.
Readers hoping for a plot in the usual sense should be warned that this is a book in which the climax is a book group.
Best for readers who found their own life in a library, and a poor choice for anyone who has not.
Historical Context & Significance
Among Others won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2011 Nebula Award, and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and won the British Fantasy Award.
Jo Walton is Welsh and lives in Montreal, and the novel is openly semi autobiographical in its setting, its disability and its reading. She has said Mori's diary is close to her own adolescence in the Welsh valleys.
Its win was read within the field as fandom rewarding a book about fandom, and it was the rare Hugo winner whose central pleasure is bibliographic. Walton also wrote a decade of essays rereading old science fiction for Tor.com, later collected as What Makes This Book So Great, which is essentially Mori grown up.