My Real Children by Jo Walton
320 pages
Published 2014
Read from August 20 to August 21
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
For much of its length this struck me as a gentler, more soft-spoken update of The Female Man (though the comparison strains when I note that Pat/Trisha experienced divergent lives after a choice of her own, rather than as a result of different social environments). My biggest complaint is that most of it is rather boring, a quiet British family drama novel seen through two colored lenses. My Real Children can be a tearjerker, even soggy at times, but after a certain point the two alternate narratives skim rather than linger, forwarding through a practical bullet list of family developments and deaths and illnesses and births and world politics without the life and gusto of the earlier portions of the book. The ending feels inevitable and wholly unsurprising -- maybe even unearned -- and more suited for a short story besides. Still, I've yet to read a Jo Walton book that I didn't enjoy; her gentle prose goes down smooth.
No comments:
Post a Comment