Among Others is a love letter to the idea of science fiction as a genre, a book that leaves large parts of the narrative submerged.

Morwenna Phelps is a 15 year old girl who's solace in life is books. Torn from her extensive Welsh family and sent to a boarding school in England, we follow her journal for six months. Mori has a lot of problems. She's fifteen; she was severely injured in a car crash which killed her twin sister Morganna, she hates her school which has terrible food, uniforms, and sports; she misses the hills and valleys of Wales; it's impossible to get American scifi books in a timely manner; and oh yeah, she sees fairies; her insane mother is a witch and caused the car crash which killed her sister, and is trying to finish the job to achieve ultimate magical power.

There's a refreshing realism in the way that Mori writes about the problems of school, her love of books, and fairies and magic in the same voice. She's a powerful character, confident and judgmental in the way that only a precocious teenager can be, but also vulnerable and confused. Her world simply is, and that's a triumph of realistic writing and character development. That said, beyond the semi-autobiographical elements (Jo Walton and Mori are the same age, and grew up in similar places, share severe leg pain, and obviously had similar interests in period scifi), I'm not sure how deep this book goes.

There's a coming of age story about Mori finding her karass (a found-family borrow from Vonnegut), and about the knife-edges of class issues in England and Wales at the time. I'm not saying that Mori is self-centered, but none of the other characters in the novel really come into focus as complete people. Her father is maybe the closest, but mostly it's a matter of if people are consumed by or rise above their personal tragedies, depending on how much Mori likes them.

The magical stuff, with fairies and witchcraft and the like, is great. Fairies are nature spirits that cluster around human ruins, some beautiful, most misshapen and tree-like. They speak in a broken language of verbs and adjectives and no nouns. Magic is imbued in objects, that take on purposes for certain people. A chair wants to be sat in, a certain kitchen knife hungers for blood, and so on. Magic itself works by chains of coincidence. Drop a flower in a lake and factory shuts down, or was it financial analysts in London cutting their losses? This thing is that magic is about 10% of the book.

The science fiction element is probably what grabbed the Hugo voters, but it's just name-checking. Ursula K. Le Guin is flatly declared to have the single best short story collection ever; Roger Zelazny is diverse and 'just brill', Piers Anthony is kinda crap. Mori doesn't say anything about science fiction, exception that it exists and that she loves it. There's an interesting story about the "real" fantasy of Mori's magic, and the "fictional" fantasy of literature, but Among Others never really gets to this.

The depiction of Mori in this book is legitimately great, but everything else depends on how much you see beneath the surface.