My Real Children
Jul. 23rd, 2014 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraMy Real Children was the most emotionally moving Jo Walton book I've read - I often find her a little emotionally flat somehow, but this one really worked for me, even the romance. Also a very strong contender in the field of Alzheimers/dementia SFF; I feel like I've read a bunch of stories from the POV of family or caregivers, but not a lot from the point of view of the actual, er, dementor. (I guess that should be "demented" or "dementee", like dementia is something happening to the passive person, but it's sort of interesting to reframe them as the actor, dementing.)
My copy says "One woman. Two worlds. Two lives." right there on the cover, so I'm going to go ahead and spoil the premise - the main character makes a choice early on in her life and then we see how her whole life proceeds differently depending on which way she chooses, and in the background, world history is also playing out differently.
I thought it was really interesting in light of Kate Atkinson's _Life After Life_, which uses many repeated cycles and epicycles instead of parallel lines, but very much felt like it was interested in similar themes - what kind of impact can one ordinary person have on the world? What matters more to a good life, personal ties or the greater good? How were women's choices in particular limited in the past and how much did that change over the course of the 20th century? Someday someone is going to teach both of these books in a class, maybe as part of a theme of "middle aged women writers disgusted by contemporary militarism"; there is a real longing in both for a better world where we manage to stop bombing people, mixed with varying amounts of sadness and doubt about whether it could be possible.
ETA: One of the most powerful parts for me was when her children are moving Trish to a nursing home and won't let her take her computer, which she's been using extensively as an assistive device for to-do lists and reminders and to look things up online that she's trying to remember and to email her grandchildren. And then they get her a new laptop, but say it would just be impossible to get her internet access in the nursing home, and she doesn't have a desk to put it on and keeps forgetting to plug it in after she uses it, and no one is at all interested in trying to solve these problems, and that was just so awful and frustrating that they *took away her adaptive technology*. And I was reminded of how the most upsetting part of Mira Grant's Parasite to me was when her family lock her up and take away her internet access, and, I don't know, if you set Misery in the present day there would totally be dramatic scenes of Annie smashing Paul's cellphone. Mrs. Rochester scuttles back and forth in the attic all night with her laptop, trying to find a corner with wireless signal. The Internet As Lavinia's Tongue And Hands. Maybe we're not transhuman yet but I certainly have a cyborg sensibility about certain technology.
My copy says "One woman. Two worlds. Two lives." right there on the cover, so I'm going to go ahead and spoil the premise - the main character makes a choice early on in her life and then we see how her whole life proceeds differently depending on which way she chooses, and in the background, world history is also playing out differently.
I thought it was really interesting in light of Kate Atkinson's _Life After Life_, which uses many repeated cycles and epicycles instead of parallel lines, but very much felt like it was interested in similar themes - what kind of impact can one ordinary person have on the world? What matters more to a good life, personal ties or the greater good? How were women's choices in particular limited in the past and how much did that change over the course of the 20th century? Someday someone is going to teach both of these books in a class, maybe as part of a theme of "middle aged women writers disgusted by contemporary militarism"; there is a real longing in both for a better world where we manage to stop bombing people, mixed with varying amounts of sadness and doubt about whether it could be possible.
ETA: One of the most powerful parts for me was when her children are moving Trish to a nursing home and won't let her take her computer, which she's been using extensively as an assistive device for to-do lists and reminders and to look things up online that she's trying to remember and to email her grandchildren. And then they get her a new laptop, but say it would just be impossible to get her internet access in the nursing home, and she doesn't have a desk to put it on and keeps forgetting to plug it in after she uses it, and no one is at all interested in trying to solve these problems, and that was just so awful and frustrating that they *took away her adaptive technology*. And I was reminded of how the most upsetting part of Mira Grant's Parasite to me was when her family lock her up and take away her internet access, and, I don't know, if you set Misery in the present day there would totally be dramatic scenes of Annie smashing Paul's cellphone. Mrs. Rochester scuttles back and forth in the attic all night with her laptop, trying to find a corner with wireless signal. The Internet As Lavinia's Tongue And Hands. Maybe we're not transhuman yet but I certainly have a cyborg sensibility about certain technology.
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Date: 2014-07-23 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-25 08:36 pm (UTC)