A Book Set in a Different Country

Back to the Better Reading Challenge. Today we're going with "A book set in a different country." I could have chosen a few here, as I've read books set in Sweden and Canada and Germany and Iowa so far this year (see what I did there?)

However, I've gone with Jo Walton's Among Others, which is set in England and Wales.

This is a book in which not a lot happens. And I'm actually okay with that. It's a book about recovering from a trauma, reality, and loving books. Sometimes recovery requires that not much "happen," I guess in a way that I hadn't thought about before reading this book. Mori, the main character, needs the process of reading and writing to recover from the events that led up to her running away from home and finding her long-estranged father.

It's a meditation on the power of "others," fictional, real, and maybe real. And for the duration of this book, the power of others is largely generative helping Mori to heal from the destructive months that precede the story itself. It's about how being smart is attractive and how desire can be an important part of healing (as is Lovely Bones, in a totally different way).

It is also a powerful love letter to early Sci-Fi. It brought me back to my early 20s, when I had inherited a lot of old paperbacks from my Dad and went on a big Asimov/Clarke/LeGuin/Heinlein/Herbert reading binge. My engagement with Sci-Fi hasn't stayed quite as strong as it was fifteen years ago, so I hadn't read nearly as deeply as Mori does, but it was fun to reflect on the power of possibility and imagination that helps Mori heal.

I don't know what to make of the fairies, or magic in the book, which is why it gets this category and not the "a book with magic" label. And I've just realized I've said dead nothing about England or Wales here! Ha. Well, Wales is represented as a combination of wild and etched away by industry, which if you've taken the train from London to Swansea certainly is true. Mori's role, in part, is to help the wild reclaim places that industrialization has destroyed (if you believe the magic part is true). This really has to happen in Wales, I think, rather than England, which is represented through the traditional British Boarding School and Family With Old Money. While Mori spends most of the book at the boarding school, it's Wales and the nearby town that have an impact on her life. There should be more books set in Wales.