Jo Walton

Stand-alone novels:

Tooth and Claw — (2003) Publisher: A tale of love, money, and family conflict — among dragons. A family deals with the death of their father. A son goes to court for his inheritance. Another son agonises over his father's deathbed confession. One daughter becomes involved in the abolition movement, while another sacrifices herself for her husband. And everyone in the tale is a dragon, red in tooth and claw. Here is a world of politics and train stations, of churchmen and family retainers, of courtship and country houses... in which, on the death of an elder, family members gather to eat the body of the deceased. In which the great and the good avail themselves of the privilege of killing and eating the weaker children, which they do with ceremony and relish, growing stronger thereby. You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw.

Tooth and Claw

Bon Agornin, patriarch of a well-off family, is on his death bed. His family has gathered around him, including his oldest son Penn, who is a country parson, and Avan, the younger brother who is making his way up in the bureaucracy of the capital city. Also there are his unmarried daughters Haner and Selendra, and oldest daughter Berend, who is married to Daverak, a young nobleman. When Daverak claims a large part of Bon's wealth, a complex family drama starts, involving an inheritance battle and the search for suitable matches for the young daughters.

So far, fairly standard plotting for a Jane Austen novel. The twist here is that every character in Tooth and Claw is a dragon, and the wealth of the dying dragon doesn't only include his hoard of gold but also the flesh of his body, which dragon children traditionally eat to grow in strength.

When I read the reviews for this novel, I couldn't have been less excited. First of all, I try to avoid fantasy with dragons because I think they are the oldest cliché in the book, and secondly, it simply sounded too gimmicky.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. Tooth and Claw is expertly written in the Victorian style, including third person omniscient POV with the occasional authorial side-step (“Dear reader, at this point you are probably surprised by...” and so on). Aside from a strange fondness for run-on sentences, Jo Walton does a great job impersonating Jane Austen. She also paints a realistic dragon society (yes, I know), including religion, social values, and even some social upheaval on the horizon. After a few chapters, it somehow seemed normal to be reading Pride and Prejudice with dragons. To my surprise, I ended up enjoying Tooth and Claw tremendously. —Stefan Raets

Among Others — (2011) Publisher: Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment. Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled — and her twin sister dead. Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England–a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off… Combining elements of autobiography with flights of imagination in the manner of novels like Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, this is potentially a breakout book for an author whose genius has already been hailed by peers like Kelly Link, Sarah Weinman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Among Others

Kids nowadays have it easy. If you’re into fantasy, there’s a good chance that the books you like have a devoted following and a few dedicated web sites. There may be movie franchises and/or an HBO series about them. You can buy Team Jacob/Team Edward shirts, Harry Potter glasses and A Game of Thrones calendars. There may be book release parties, even people sleeping in front of the bookstore when the next book is due out. There’s GoodReads, Shelfari and Librarything, and even if you’re not on one of those sites, it’s never been easier to connect with other fans and with the authors themselves.

Growing up in the seventies, it was considerably harder to meet like-minded readers or even just find out about the existence of books you might want to read: as unreliable as Amazon release dates can be, they’re at least an indication that the author is a) still alive and b) working on the next book in the series. Back then, all you had were the order forms in the back of paperbacks and whatever happened to be stocked in your local library or bookstore. Being a budding SFF fan was a lot more work back then than it is nowadays.

Take Morwenna, the main character of Jo Walton’s excellent new novel Among Others. Her main passion in life — aside from magic — is reading science fiction and fantasy. She lives her life thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. When she runs away from home — after successfully preventing her mother’s attempt to gain dark magical powers but in the process becoming crippled and losing her twin sister — one of her main concerns is picking the right books to take along. Whatever else is going on in her strange, lonely life, the early masterworks of science fiction and fantasy are always there for her, and if one famous saying guides her, it might be the famous Erasmus quote: "When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."

Among Others is essentially the diary of one significant stage of Morwenna’s life: after running away, her custody is assigned to her previously absentee father, but because he lives with (and is controlled by) his three sisters, Mori quickly finds herself sent to boarding school. A Welsh girl in England, crippled and shy, she’s already an outsider even before she gets thrown into the brutal politics of an all-teenage-girls boarding school. As Mori comments, in her typical wry way: “It’s depressing how much boarding school is just like Enid Blyton showed it, and all the ways it’s different are ways it’s worse.”

And “diary” is meant literally here: the novel actually consists of Mori’s day-by-day diary entries, describing her arrival at her father’s house, her move to the boarding school, occasional trips back home and so on. Before you start thinking that Morwenna is a female and well-read version of Adrian Mole, let me assure you that this diary makes for much more interesting reading than you might expect, because Mori’s way of looking at the world is consistently fascinating — and not just because she can speak to spirits. She’s funny, snarky and self-deprecating, and of course well versed in SF and fantasy. It’s a true pleasure to read how she deals with the abrupt changes in her life, the prison-like atmosphere of boarding school, and her mother’s attempts to contact and control her. Witnessing her growing confidence and the gradual expansion of her social circle, I genuinely found myself rooting for her.

I doubt that someone who doesn’t love SF and fantasy would have the same appreciation for Among Others, because it sometimes seems that Mori’s feelings about the books she reads are more important than the actual plot of the novel. Mori’s excitement about finding other SFF readers, or discovering a new Roger Zelazny novel in a bookstore, is simply infectious. On the other hand, if you’re not familiar with the books and authors she frequently mentions, Among Others might not have the same impact on you. Confession: I haven’t read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., so I wasn’t familiar with some of that novel’s made-up vocabulary, which Mori applies to her own life several times, but thanks to Wikipedia I learned what a granfalloon and a karass are — and I’m now also very curious to read this book! Still, whether you get the exact references or not, anyone who spent some of their darker teenage years finding comfort in books will almost automatically identify and empathize with Mori. (Seeing how absurdly happy she gets when discovering that inter-library loans are not only available but free, I found myself wishing I could transport myself to her time and area to hand her a fully loaded e-book reader.)

Aside from the genuine love for science fiction and fantasy that permeates every ounce of this novel, it also features a loving picture of an isolated, intelligent young woman finding her place in life, and a simple but solid present-day fantasy plot that slowly unfolds to reach a satisfying conclusion. Anyone who enjoyed Graham Joyce’s The Tooth Fairy will probably love Among Others (and vice versa). The novel reads smoothly, is never boring, and is very hard to put down. Also, Jo Walton’s concept of “deniable magic” made me reconsider magic and its “causality” (for want of a better word) in a whole new way.

Exactly how much of Among Others is autobiographical I don’t know, but if Jo Walton’s fascinating blog entries at Tor.com are an indication, there’s at least one quality she undoubtedly shares with Mori: her love for science fiction and fantasy. There’s a wonderful passage in Among Others: without planning, Mori and some friends find themselves heading towards the bookstore almost unwittingly. One person mentions that sunflowers are “heliotropes” — they automatically orient themselves towards the sun — and then says that Mori and her friends must be bibliotropes. Borrowing that wonderful word, I think it’s fair to say that Among Others by Jo Walton is a novel for bibliotropes. Highly recommended.
—Stefan Raets