"Among Others" by Jo Walton (2011)

 **A book about that very particular part of a very particular type of person's life, the time in which the characters in the books you read are more important and more tangible than people in the 'real' world with whom you're forced to spend your time**

I didn't know it was possible to fall in love with a book literally from the author's foreword "thanks and notes" section, and yet here we are:

People tell you to write what you know, but I’ve found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up. It’s easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it’s much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little more detachment. It’s terrible advice! So this is why you’ll find there’s no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though.

And that's what this book is about.  It's informed by Walton's own experiences of being Welsh and feeling alone at English boarding school, her experiences walking with a cane when all the girls around her could run, her experiences with a paranoid schizophrenic mother.  And Walton has said that the response to what she called a "mythologization of part of my life" made her realize that while her experiences were unique, her feelings of loneliness are far more common than she knew, resonated far wider than she expected

The book starts with tragedy, picking up after our main character Mor and her sister have defeated their mother, an evil witch (or is she?), harnessing the magic of the fairies of Wales's wild places (though they may be the only ones who can see or speak with them).  In the process and with the final angry throes of their mother's magic, her twin sister is killed and Mor is left with a limp (or was it just a car crash?).  Forced to live with her estranged father--"And once I had to use social services to get away from her, they couldn’t do anything, because to social services an auntie you have known all your life is nobody compared to a father you haven’t even met."--she is sent to boarding school and she finds solace the same way Walton did as a child:  Through science fiction and fantasy novels

How good is this book?  It's good enough that not only was it great on its own, but it let me appreciate another classic work even more.  Because  I never really understood the Scouring of the Shire, the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings, until Walton explained it to me.  It just seemed so out of place, after the massive good versus evil struggle was resolved, to have to get myself excited and worried about such a minor conflict afterwards.  To be perfectly honest, a lot of time on rereads of the novels I'd just skip that part (and the movie makers, probably correctly, chose likewise to leave it out).  But here's Mor's (Walton's) take on it:

Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end.  Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand.

Walton is right; Tolkien was right.  The Scouring of the Shire . . . is where we live the majority of our lives.  We all have the big conflicts, the big moments in our lives.  Hopefully we and our loved ones make it out of those, although not always.  Not everyone.  But regardless, those of us still here have to keep on going.  Win or lose, the next day shows up and it has its problems and inconveniences and minor challenges, and you need to get yourself motivated to tackle them and keep moving.  And sometimes that's really hard

Plenty of stories talk to us about how to deal with the great battle, the cosmic conflict, whatever.  Far fewer teach us about what to do afterwards, "in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand."  Thanks, Jo Walton.  Thanks, J. R. R. Tolkien

I loved this book because Walton touches on such fundamental truths about life, about loneliness, about growing up.  And yes, this is a book about loss, and it's a book about letting go, and it's a book about moving on.  I don't know if I've ever seen that pain conveyed in fewer words than when Mor confronts the ghost of her sister:

I am fifteen and a half, and she is still and always fourteen.

She knows she has to keep living, even though her sister won't.  Because in the end we do move on.  We find new things and new people that make life worth living (book clubs are the best, that's just a factual statement).  We can certainly be helped, in the hardest times of our lives, by good books

I loved this book

There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head.