Jo Walton, My Real Children

Jo Walton is one of those authors whose work I usually end up at best admiring, but not connecting with (and John M Ford, who provided the epigraph, is/was another). I liked Ha’Penny (the middle of the Small Change trilogy) but Among Others, Tooth and Claw, the Sulien books etc have all failed to work for me at eliciting anything besides polite interest. My Real Children does the same; it’s readable, it has an interesting central conceit, and it totally fails to have anything like the emotional impact described by other reviewers on me. While this is obviously an individual response I did get tearful over a Sandra Boynton board book recently so it’s not entirely due to my inherent heartlessness.

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