I'm really tempted to quit this book: I don't find the mystery gripping, the main character isn't very interesting to me, and I'm not feeling the magic. Not to mention the fact that I seem to be reading a fantasy novel about a girl obsessed with sci-fi - almost all of which I haven't read so it feels like I'm missing a million references that would make the book better.

"Karass" - used like its an every day word, but the only place I could find a definition was the urban dictionary. Ugh.

And after typing all that, I'm going to quit the book. ( )

The best part of the book was so nostalgic -- the idea of combing bookstores and finding The Book! The Amazing Fantasy or SciFi book that you've never heard of before, but it's by your favorite author and it is just so perfect! Finding The Book in bookstores and on my friends' book cases was a huge part of my adolescent years. It makes me kind of want to earmark the authors that Walton name checks that I've never read: (Zelazny, Delany, Tiptree embarrassingly enough) and never Amazon or Google them and only hunt down their books in used bookstores to recreate the feeling. But I know that truly that feeling is a little eradicated, because even if I play by the rules, I know that they're arbitrary and in real life I can get whatever book I want whenever I want, which is great, except that it ruins the mystique.

I also liked that "is it real or isn't it?" feel of the book. Reading as a teenager, I never would have questioned that the subtle magic in the book was indeed the highest reality. But I love Walton's depiction of that subtle magic, which as an adult, you can't help but second guess: "maybe Mor is just subconsciously coming up with a narrative to explain why bad thing X happened." I love that the book works on both levels and that it forces you to consider both -- it's such a great way to depict magic.

So what didn't I like? Well, I think my expectations were set too high by Jon and Beka, who both said this book was the most amazing thing in the history of books. Also, while reading the book I had an overwhelming, terribly distracting sense of how much I would have loved this book if I had read it back when I was 18. My 18 year old self would have promptly declared it her favorite book in the history of books, too, but since I'm no longer her, I felt almost guilty reading it.

Ultimately, I just felt like I didn't "get it." So, there's this girl, and some bad magic happened in her past, and now she goes to a boarding school, where she's a little social isolated, but then she joins a book club and along the way she buys a lot of books and sees a lot of faeries, and that's all well and good, but when is the plot going to begin? Oh, the book is over, so I guess there just isn't a plot? And I can handle a lack of a plot if the character growth and development is well done, but after awhile I got bored of reading about Mor read and go to bookstores, and I would rather be reading and going to bookstores myself. ( )

Het boek is in dagboekvorm. Dat zorgt bij mij in eerste instantie altijd even voor wat zorg. Niet elke schrijver kan dat op een meeslepende manier doen. Het is echt moeilijk weet ik uit eigen ervaring. Maar Jo Walton kan het. En hoe. Ik kan me dit boek niet in een andere vorm voorstellen.

De vele verwijzingen naar boeken die ik zelf gelezen heb of ooit nog wil lezen, maken dat het me enorm intrigeert. Ook de subtiele verwijzingen naar wat er is gebeurd, maakten me erg benieuwd naar de rest van het verhaal. De karakters zijn wat vlak, maar de hoofdpersoon is wat beter uitgewerkt. Genoeg in ieder geval om met haar mee te leven en om haar te begrijpen. Dat de karakters wat vlak zijn, heeft denk ik ook te maken met de dagboekvorm. Je ziet ze vanuit Mori's ogen en dat op zich voorkomt al een diepgang die je gemakkelijker hebt in een boek dat geschreven is vanuit meerdere gezichtspunten bijvoorbeeld.

Er zitten stukjes maatschappijkritiek in, maar subtieler dan bij "Farthing", als ik het me goed herinner. Al met al een zeer genietbaar boek, dat me niet alleen tijdens het lezen bezighield. ( )

Rather at a loss to say why I loved it, but I loved it nonetheless. ( )

Mo is embarking upon a new life with her father whom she's just met for the first time, attending a boarding school unlike any she's been in before, fitting into a social scene that rejects her, in a foreign country, relegated to using her second language as she struggles with a crippling injury, the death of a close family member, unwanted adult male attention, and maintaining distance from her psychotic mother who keeps sending her threatening mail. None of this seems to weigh her down much. The idea here, I think (because I wasn't made to feel it), is that Mo has plenty of genre fiction to read, therefore all is well. This is where Jo Walton gets to share her own list of genre favourites she read while growing up, making them Mo's (I've read "What Makes This Book So Great" and the correlation seems pretty spot on.)

It has an original take on fairies and magic that bends them as close to real world as possible: coincidences are magic in action, etc. It's an interesting approach that isn't explored much; a thin, barely-there veneer of fantasy over the tale of a girl enduring boarding school and her weird family. Mo is likeable enough that I kept reading despite having no idea what the story was, while questions kept distracting me. Who is Mo writing to, that she has to explain all of the school's inner workings? Why does she think or say something that sounds childish, and then a page later demonstrates an improbable wisdom for her years? The romantic element is nice, but here's a tip: if your boyfriend is that ready and eager to propose killing your parent then you should probably re-evaluate that relationship. Unless you're Mo, I guess, who doesn't even blink.

I'd probably enjoy a conversation with Jo Walton, since the highlights for me came from reading between the lines about her own experience with growing up Welsh, and what reading had meant and continues to mean to her. I would expect that in an essay or a speech, but I was expecting something different in a novel, maybe a dramatized passage towards grasping this understanding. Mo has that understanding from the very start, so it subverts that expectation. This novel is never aiming to carve its own place in genre. Instead it is an ode to what its readers love about genre. What it dramatizes is a defense of genre's value and place in the world. If you subtract the crazy boyfriend. ( )