by Jo Walton
What if. What if. What if. This question drives to much fiction, but we rarely see it overtly addressed. Books like Kate Atkinson’s stunning Life After Life are few and far between, unfortunately for me. Jo Walton’s My Real Children, while not as wildly experimental as Life After Life, gave me anoth...
This book wasn't what I expected, though if you asked me what I *had* expected I'm not sure I'd have been able to pin down precisely what those expectations were. I can say it was simultaneously more sci-fi and far less sci-fi than I expected. More in that the divergent timelines were both set in al...
Patricia Cowan is 88 (or is it 89?), in a nursing home, and both she and her nurses are aware that she is (as they put it) "Very Confused." She insists that there's an elevator, but sometimes there's only a stair lift. Sometimes the bathroom is on the left, and sometimes it's on the right. She fo...
My Real Children Jo Walton, 2014 Patricia Cowen sees that the note the nurses have written in her chart says “Confused Today.” She’s often confused, from forgetting major events to where she put her glasses. But she also remembers things that don’t seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and ...
( boy, this one is a TBR, for sure! ) : *** It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know—what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don’t seem possible....
I loooved Among Others, Walton’s Hugo-winning 2011 book. My Real Children is her first book after Among Others and I was a bit nervous about it because of that. Now that I’ve read it, I’m left with the most mixed of mixed feelings. On the one hand, the premise! It sounds a bit gimmicky, but in Wal...
Jo Walton’s books always seem to come out around 3.5 stars for me: I like them, but not as much as I want to. I keep coming back because she is a good writer, and because, unlike most fantasy authors, she has a talent for telling a story in one book without padding, and for telling a unique story ev...
(Description nicked from B&N.com.) “It’s 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. “Confused today,” read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know—what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remem...
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