I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s evocative novel Among Others. A fantasy story set in Wales during the late seventies, it positively resonates with compassion for teens, geeks, outcasts–our younger selves.

The book’s compassionate tone is established by the epigraph–a quote from critic Farah Mendlesohn, who offers this advice to her younger self: “It’s going to improve. Honest. There really are people out there that you will like and who will like you.”

As my friend Mike noted in his review for Strange Horizons, “Walton’s story is very much one for insiders…for those of us who grew up lonely among non-readers, non-SF readers or, well, among others.”

The book’s main plot involves the struggle of a lonely geek girl to find a karass, Vonnegut’s term for a tribe of people cosmically linked together. Disabled, unpopular, and isolated, Mor’s only happiness is reading fantasy and science fiction. Eventually, she exchanges her loneliness for community, learning about science fiction conventions and finding a bunch of people who read Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., Zalazny, and Tolkien.

This may not sound like much of a plot, but Walton doesn’t need action sequences when she has a narrator as perceptive and real as Morwenna.

(Actually, there is a plot: a conflict involving Mor’s crazy mother, who may or may not be a witch trying to control her through magic, but that story line isn’t the point of this beautiful novel. The point is that there are other people in this world who are like you.)