The book, which at once took three of the most prestigious literary prizes in the field of fiction - "Hugo", "Locus" and "Nebula", undoubtedly should be a landmark for the literary process. It should be a new Dick, Saymak, Asimov or Zelazny, no less!
A native of Wales, fifteen-year-old Morwenna Phelps, who previously lived with her grandfather and aunt, found herself in the care of her father who abandoned her family 13 years ago. Strict aunts from dad's side, on whom the man depends financially, immediately shoved the girl into a girls' boarding school in England, where Maury has to look for new friends, gain authority among classmates and find time for what she loves most in the world - reading.
But this story would not be a fantasy if, for all that, Morwenna would not be a young sorceress able to communicate with the fairies hiding in the crowns of trees...
Countless books with titles like "Magic Academy", "Magic School", "Witch University", "Magic Magician's College with the faculty of hereditary witches", cut according to the same template and written with the left heel with the eyes of their author closed, I, as a reader, get awe, fear and horror, and not at all because they describe something truly creepy.
So, taking up "Among Others", I really, really hoped that the book would not turn out to be similar to something of the above. And hooray, it didn't turn out: despite the rather dubious annotation, Joe Walton's novel is much more a story about a girl who is truly in love with books, who has survived and is trying to get out of a difficult childhood with a crazy mother and a spineless father who has run away, than another book about how a muggle girl with jokes and jokes and along the way finding the love of her life won with the help of a magic potion / wand /mandrake root of some villainous villain. But yes, and love, and villains - all this will be, though not in the foreground.
When reading, I was almost happy to the end, how wonderful everything turned out to be: both the narrator is interesting, and there are no intrigues in the plot, and 99% of what is described is quite real, and the remaining 1% can be attributed to childhood trauma, developed imagination and the fact that some "little people" really live on the territory of the British Isles.
Of course, "Among others" is more captivating with its modest charm and the fact that Maury Phelps is a real bookworm who does not hesitate to talk about the anticipation of the pleasure of the book, shaking at the sight of a new novel by a favorite author, the joy of finding like-minded people with whom you can discuss what you have read. It is clear that if you are also familiar with all these feelings, you will understand Morven perfectly.
Her diary entries, which we dive into when reading the text of the book, are at the same time an attempt to reflect on the past, and a chronicle of today and a reader's diary, from which you can steal a bunch of interesting titles and names of authors for the future (well, this is if you like science fiction and fantasy, because Mori herself does not particularly like realism, it is boring for her).
But apart from this, it is interesting to observe how, on 350 pages, the author mixed the themes of growing up, the influence of reading literature of certain genres on the formation of character, the perception of mythology by modern people, the conflation between representatives of different peoples living in the territory of the modern United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and much more.
But then the finale crept up unnoticed, which fit into 20 pages of text in an e-book, and I was overwhelmed with universal disappointment. Firstly, the finale really "crept up", because it seemed to be artificially embedded in a certain part of the book with some kind of screwdriver, secondly, it seemed to me outrageously stupid, not clarifying anything, and made "to fuck off" in order to somehow complete the story, which clearly already claimed to last forever and end with the death of the narrator.
I was already thinking that "Among others" is some part of the novel cycle, and it's not a fact that the first one happens to our publishers, but no, it's an independent finished text. As a result, it remains only to spread his hands: it is clear that the climactic scene of the novel is, among other things, an allegorical narrative about how a girl changes fairy tales to real life, how a person experiences trauma, realizing that he really wants and will live on, whatever awaits him, but he wanted something more serious, more voluminous and detailed, and not the "zilch" that Miss Walton came up with.
I recommend the book to teenagers of 13-17 years old who are interested in fantasy and fantasy, and those who are fans of Pullman, Gaiman and a bunch of other creators of more or less unconventional yang-adult prose, in which the magical and far-reaching reading process itself is more important than the plot itself.
400.806 SRY