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. ( )

I re-read this one after hearing it discussed on the Overdue Podcast. Yes, I'm a scifi fangirl. Those books are the foundation of my love for the genre.
( )

So many awards for this book and I normally love Jo Walton but this book didn't really sing with me. It had all sorts of stuff I should love: a heroine that was a voracious reader and a huge scifi geek, magical realism, fairies, but it seemed meandering and the conflict didn't really seem compelling to me up until the last chapter or two. I think it's a good book but fell down for me on pacing and a strong narrator voice (Mor's diary entries) that I just didn't enjoy. Strange because I usually love first person/epistolary stories but this one just wasn't my cup of tea. ( )

This book was dripping with nostalgia. Unfortunately, this wasn't my nostalgia. I may have enjoyed this book more if I had been a teenager during the late 1970s/early 1980s but since I wasn't, I think I missed most of the inside references to books I had not read. I have read maybe one book out of every five Mori name drops.

I found it odd that this book isn't about the Big Event, but what happens after. Mori has to deal with the various fall-outs of defeating her evil witch mother - losing her twin sister, injuring her leg, moving in with her father, and in general just learning how to move on. And considering that most of this is done in her journal talking about the copious amounts of books she reads, it frankly ends up rather boring.

I noticed that many people categorized this as a YA book. I would emphatically not. This is a book for those who spent hours holed up somewhere reading the newest Heinlein and Zelazny - before the days YA was even a market and there was only children's books and everything else. When fandom was just struggling to gain identity and outcasts discovered there were others in the world just like them.

It was an okay book, but I was expecting so much more from a book that won the Hugo. I think I was the wrong age group for this one. ( )

This was a 3.5 for me. Much of the book feels like a sci-fi circle-jerk, but the narrative style is compelling ( )