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A review by stephxsu
My Real Children by Jo Walton
4.0
For a creative writing class in college, I was asked to write a short story for the prompt of a character's entire life story. This turned out to be harder than it seemed. Fiction takes, for the most part, a close look at one significant portion or strand of a person's life. With the exception of obituaries and biographies/memoirs, it is difficult to make meaning out of telling a person's entire life story (and even obituaries struggle to do so).
Gosh I am in love with Jo Walton, authoress. She bends genres. Her books are labeled sci-fi, but they don't have the bang-flash of intergalactic wars and hyperspeed-capable spaceships. Instead, Walton takes the mundane life and puts a twist on it so that we are forced to think about how we define "meaning" and "significance." If you didn't know the premise before you began reading--a confused old lady in a nursing home remembers living two extremely different lives--you might've found it difficult to press on. The disadvantage of writing about an entire life (let alone two) is that there's so much to cover that you inevitably feel like you're missing out on some deeper understanding of the character(s). Walton is skilled enough to mostly prevent this: there's a lot to cover about both Pat and Tricia's lives, yes, but all in all they are both lives that are fulfilling, lives worth living.
That's one of two things that impresses me most about MY REAL CHILDREN. I thought that one of the women's lives would be automatically more appealing than the other's, but that's not the case. Both Pat and Tricia's lives have their ups and their downs, their triumphs and their tragedies, their pros and their cons. Just when you think Pat's definitely got the better deal, Tricia's life surges forward in terms of fulfillment. And when heartbreak befalls Tricia, Pat's life seems better. Just like any good work of fiction should do, reading about Pat and Tricia's lives got me to thinking about our lives in general. I used to think there was one way I wanted to live my life, and to choose the other path would make it lose meaning. But MY REAL CHILDREN made me realize that meaning can be found in any lifestyle--and, conversely, just because you're living the dream doesn't mean you've got it all.
And even after all that thinking and philosophizing, Walton still manages to throw us for a loop at the very end of the book. Here's the second thing that I find so impressive about MY REAL CHILDREN: it gets us to think about the bigger picture. Like, what if the "butterfly effect" was a real thing? What if, when it came down to it, our greatest contribution to society was not our deliberate choices, but rather the actions that we forgot we even performed the moment we did them? Would Albert Einstein's mother have reared him differently if she knew she was raising the boy who'd grow up to change the entire field of physics? What if the difference between an okay society and a better one hinged upon your throwaway action of giving a homeless guy your spare change on a cold night?
With MY REAL CHILDREN, Jo Walton took a challenging story concept--the entire life story of two characters--and spun it into a bittersweet montage of living that left me thinking about how to live my life more deliberately.
Gosh I am in love with Jo Walton, authoress. She bends genres. Her books are labeled sci-fi, but they don't have the bang-flash of intergalactic wars and hyperspeed-capable spaceships. Instead, Walton takes the mundane life and puts a twist on it so that we are forced to think about how we define "meaning" and "significance." If you didn't know the premise before you began reading--a confused old lady in a nursing home remembers living two extremely different lives--you might've found it difficult to press on. The disadvantage of writing about an entire life (let alone two) is that there's so much to cover that you inevitably feel like you're missing out on some deeper understanding of the character(s). Walton is skilled enough to mostly prevent this: there's a lot to cover about both Pat and Tricia's lives, yes, but all in all they are both lives that are fulfilling, lives worth living.
That's one of two things that impresses me most about MY REAL CHILDREN. I thought that one of the women's lives would be automatically more appealing than the other's, but that's not the case. Both Pat and Tricia's lives have their ups and their downs, their triumphs and their tragedies, their pros and their cons. Just when you think Pat's definitely got the better deal, Tricia's life surges forward in terms of fulfillment. And when heartbreak befalls Tricia, Pat's life seems better. Just like any good work of fiction should do, reading about Pat and Tricia's lives got me to thinking about our lives in general. I used to think there was one way I wanted to live my life, and to choose the other path would make it lose meaning. But MY REAL CHILDREN made me realize that meaning can be found in any lifestyle--and, conversely, just because you're living the dream doesn't mean you've got it all.
And even after all that thinking and philosophizing, Walton still manages to throw us for a loop at the very end of the book. Here's the second thing that I find so impressive about MY REAL CHILDREN: it gets us to think about the bigger picture. Like, what if the "butterfly effect" was a real thing? What if, when it came down to it, our greatest contribution to society was not our deliberate choices, but rather the actions that we forgot we even performed the moment we did them? Would Albert Einstein's mother have reared him differently if she knew she was raising the boy who'd grow up to change the entire field of physics? What if the difference between an okay society and a better one hinged upon your throwaway action of giving a homeless guy your spare change on a cold night?
With MY REAL CHILDREN, Jo Walton took a challenging story concept--the entire life story of two characters--and spun it into a bittersweet montage of living that left me thinking about how to live my life more deliberately.