Review of Jo Walton's "Lent" @ the CHIRB

In case you missed it, my review of Jo Walton's Lent is up at the Chicago Review of Books.

This was a fun book to review, primarily because it's so weird generically: you'd definitely want to shelve it as fantasy, but it doesn't sit very exactly into any of the categories it draws on. Alternate history, time travel, and historical fiction are all in the mix. As with a lot of Walton's work, there's a unique but winning kind of character study that powers a lot of theological/philosophical exploration.

It was a real treat to write something for the CHIRB--they're a great publication in their own right, and I really dig how much they're functioning as a kind of amplifier/attractor for the Chicago literary scene. Hopefully will do some more for them soon!

Weird & Wonderful: My Real Children

We had a small group but a lovely discussion of Jo Walton's "My Real Children" (2014) at City Lit's Weird & Wonderful Book Club last week. Walton's novel is a kind of double-alternate history with deep reflections on family and ageing: Patricia, our protagonist, lived two very different lives, and is remembering both of them as she falls into dementia in a nursing facility.

The strongly science-fictional elements are mostly off screen (alternate history of space travel, medicine & technology, world politics), and since they're not very central to Patricia's life we don't get too much about them--but finding those little clues about the different worlds is one of the treats of reading this. The fantastic here lies in the dissonance/resonance between Patricia's two lives, not in any science fictional or fantastic elements within them. Each timeline kind of overlays the other, so even as you're getting wrapped up in Tricia's life, you remember that things are different in Pat's. It's a very strange and interesting effect.