A review by flying_monkey
Lifelode by Jo Walton, Sharyn November

emotional hopeful mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

An earlier (and award-winning) work from Jo Walton that hadn't been available in e-book form until now. It is based in a world which has a west-east gradient between science and magic, so the further east you travel the more magic works and gods can affect life and the more west you go, the more that rationality, research and science rule. The novel is very much character-based, and is predominantly a gentle and emotionally rich rural fantasy centred on the polyamorous domestic relationships of the inhabitants of an manor house in a slow-paced village in the Marches, an area in between the extremes of magic and reason, where magic is still everpresent but small and mundane, and where travellers from either side of the world pass through. Of course, some of these travellers are not what they seem, and it is the arrival of strangers who throw the comfortable world into disarray that gives the novel its drama. This is Walton at her most lyrical but not, at least until the end, her most dramatic.