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The Phurnicite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around.

Among Others by Jo Walton

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This is a really wonderful novel. It’s kind of weird mix of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, Matilda by Roald Dahl, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This weird combination is never all of one plus, but a blending of elements of each. Morwenna is 14 and has either just survived a horrendous car crash that killed her mother and sister, or conversely, she and her sister worked together using their shared magic to stop their mother from taking over the world of men via the […]

They hang people for murder, and while I didn’t exactly like Mummy, she was my mother after all.

Farthing by Jo Walton

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Maybe it’s just me, but I really didn’t like this book. It’s not unpleasant or anything. That’s not the issue here. It just feels false. So the book takes place in an alternative history Unite Kingdom in 1949. Rather than “what if Nazis” won the war, though it seems like maybe they kind of did, the novel wonders, what would happen in appeasement were taken to its logical conclusion and a binding peace accord were struck with Germany in 1939/1940 after Dunkirk? Ostensibly, I am […]

The one and only time it might be ok to use first person present tense narration

Lent by Jo Walton

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I was hesitant to pick this up because it’s written in first person, present tense; I’m not much of a fan of either of those. It didn’t surprise me that I was having a hard time getting into the story. I don’t know what happened, but when I picked it up again the next day, I couldn’t put it down. Jo Walton might be a bit of a miracle worker for that. Lent is basically a fictionalized version of 1492-1498 Florence, Italy. The city was […]

There’s no impersonality here.

What Makes This Book so Good? by Jo Walton

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This is a collected and bound version of a blog that Jo Walton wrote for Tor.com from about 2008-2010 (give or take). The focus of the blog was to reread various books from “Classic” sci fi to more contemporary sci fi and assess and reassess them. It probably worked fine as a blog, but as a book it’s quite limited. In part it’s limited by its relatively repetitive pattern of summary, explanation, assessment, and restart of most of the reviews. It’s also limited by the […]

Did she say yes to the dress?

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This is the first Jo Walton book that I have read and only heard about her through  reading Cannonball Read reviews (thanks, guys!).  Although this isn’t the Walton title that I was looking for at the library (Among Others),   it sounded interesting and landed in my TBR pile. I was truly captivated by the first 2/3. The last 1/3? Not so much. A woman suffering from dementia, and now confined to a nursing home, reflects on her life. Pretty straight forward, BUT, she “remembers” two […]



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