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Tag: Jo Walton

The Just City, Jo Walton

Published 29 May 2015 by Gin Jenny

So, hmmm. At the start of The Just City, Apollo can’t work out why Daphne chose to be turned into a tree rather than mate with him. When he goes to discuss it with his sister Athene, he finds her deep in the process of planning an experiment where she will put together a working version of the Just City envisioned by Plato in The Republic. Adult devotees of Plato from all throughout history will oversee the city’s establishment (with some robots to do the heavy lifting), and freed slave children will live there with the adults, learning and growing…

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Review: My Real Children, Jo Walton

Published 21 Jul 2014 by Gin Jenny

Jo Walton has carved out a very nice niche of deniably speculative fiction, in which supernatural elements are so lightly present that you could blink and miss them. Among Others caps off a full book of uncertainty about the reality of magic (by the reader — Mori believes it all along) with a legitimately otherworld fight that puts paid to any doubts you might have had. My Real Children (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) goes even lighter on the magic; when Patricia makes her decision at the end, she might as easily be senile as brave. Patricia Cowan is…

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Review: Among Others, Jo Walton

Published 1 Mar 2011 by Gin Jenny

Why I read the end: The protagonist bought I Capture the Castle thinking it was a historical fiction book about an actual siege. I half wanted to make sure Mori found out the truth about the book, and half wanted Jo Walton to leave it alone as a sly nod to those of her readers who know about I Capture the Castle, and can see its influence on Among Others. Among Others is all about a Welsh girl called Mori who has come to live with her father and his sisters after the death of her twin sister, Mor, and…

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Review: Still Life with Fascists trilogy, Jo Walton

Published 16 Sep 2010 by Gin Jenny

Britain didn’t declare war on Germany. Instead they made peace, and Britain slid gradually into fascism. One might call the trilogy the Small Change trilogy instead, as the books are called Farthing, Ha’Penny, and Half a Crown, but I like the Still Life with Fascists title better. Each book has two narrators, one the first-person narration of a young upper-class English woman, and one the third-person narration of a morally compromised policeman called Carmichael. Don’t you love a morally compromised narrator? The first book, Farthing, is a country house murder mystery. The so-called “Farthing set”, famed for their integral role…

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