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My Real Children
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Published:
Tor Publishing Group 2014
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Description

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know-what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.
Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War-those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?
Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives...and of how every life means the entire world.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read, Open EPUB eBook
Street Date:
05/20/2014
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781466800793
ASIN:
B00HTJ058C
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Jo Walton. (2014). My Real Children. Tor Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Jo Walton. 2014. My Real Children. Tor Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Jo Walton, My Real Children. Tor Publishing Group, 2014.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Jo Walton. My Real Children. Tor Publishing Group, 2014.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:51:52
Date Updated:
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      • value: amnesia
      • value: dementia
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      • value: Italy
      • value: memory loss
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      • bioText: JO WALTON won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her novel Among Others and the Tiptree Award for her novel My Real Children. Before that, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Tooth and Claw won the World Fantasy Award. The novels of her Small Change sequence—Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown—have won acclaim ranging from national newspapers to the Romantic Times Critics' Choice Award. A native of Wales, she lives in Montreal.
      • name: Jo Walton
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Tor Books
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title
My Real Children
fullDescription

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know-what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.
Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War-those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?
Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives...and of how every life means the entire world.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Lev Grossman
      • content:

        "My Real Children has as much in common with an Alice Munro story as it does with, say, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle . Good novels show us a character's destiny as an expression of who they fundamentally are. What most novels do only once, My Real Children does twice."

      • premium: False
      • source: Ursula K. Le Guin
      • content: "My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force."
      • premium: False
      • source: Cory Doctorow
      • content: "Such a wise book, about sweetness in sorrow, without any sentiment... It's easy to write a sad book, but this one uplifts and sweetens even as it tears your heart to pieces. Astounding work, even by Walton's incredibly high standards."
      • premium: False
      • source: Peter Watts
      • content: "It amazes me a little, the ease with which such a quiet tale and such spare prose managed to engage my brain, boil my blood, and-- ultimately-- break my heart. Thank you, Ms. Walton, for showing me how it's done."
      • premium: False
      • source: Jane Yolen
      • content: "A dizzying array of astonishments unfolding, a Chinese box of surprises. Once started, it is extraordinarily difficult to put this book down, even for dinner, even for bed."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        March 31, 2014
        Jo Walton’s My Real Children is a bit like a novel written from the point of view of Schrödinger’s cat, except that instead of a cat we have a smart, sympathetic Englishwoman named Patricia, and she’s not alive and dead, she’s alive twice—she lives two parallel lives, in two distinct worlds, both of which are apparently equally real.
        While the premise of My Real Children is science fictional, its tone is that of literary realism. Patricia is born in 1926, but when we first meet her she’s almost 90 and in a nursing home, where her confused memories of two different pasts are taken as a symptom of senile dementia. Patricia isn’t so sure. “It was just that things were different, things that shouldn’t have been different,” she thinks. “She remembered Kennedy being assassinated and she remembered him declining to run after the Cuban missile exchange. They couldn’t both have happened, yet she remembered them both happening.”
        In 1949, shortly after she graduates from Oxford, Patricia receives a marriage proposal from a pushy suitor named Mark, a devout Christian. In the life where she says yes, Mark and Trish (as she’s called) wind up in a terrible, loveless union; she’s a stoic, philosophical soul and a devoted mother who eventually gets involved in local politics. In the other life, where Patricia goes by Pat, she turns Mark down and later has a loving partnership with a woman named Bee and a joyful career writing travel guides. Walton tells both stories in the same even, unfussy tone: no matter how well or badly things go for Pat or Trish, the narration remains observant but calmly, coolly distant.
        The fortunes of the wider world flop the opposite way. Pat lives in a world of nuclear exchanges and rabid intolerance. Trish’s world chooses peace and international cooperation in space. (Each world is recognizably related, but not identical, to our own.) Comparing the two, Patricia is forced to wonder: did her choice split not just her own life, but the history of the entire species? Do we all possess that power, and the responsibility that comes with it?
        My Real Children has as much in common with an Alice Munro story as it does with, say, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It explores issues of choice and chance and destiny and responsibility with the narrative tools that only science fiction affords, but it’s also a deeply poignant, richly imagined book about women’s lives in 20th- and 21st-century England, and, in a broader sense, about the lives of all those who are pushed to the margins of history: the disabled, the disenfranchised, the queer, the lower middle class. My Real Children is a quiet triumph, not least because whatever life Patricia happens to be living at any given moment, she remains deeply and recognizably herself. Good novels show us a character’s destiny as an expression of who they fundamentally are. What most novels do only once, My Real Children does twice.
        Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and author of the forthcoming novel The Magician’s Land.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        April 1, 2014
        Walton (Among Others, 2011, etc.) creates an engaging fictional biography of one woman's life lived two different ways. It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is "very confused," or so they write on her charts in the nursing home. It's true that she has had dementia for years, but sometimes her room seems to have navy blue curtains and sometimes pale green blinds. More puzzling, she is sure she remembers two distinct sets of children. Both visit her, but they don't share a reality; they're from the two different lives she entered when she made the choice to marry, or not marry, Mark, when she was a young woman. The novel travels back to Patricia's childhood, a fixed narrative, and then begins alternating chapters to follow the split. In one life, she marries Mark and becomes Tricia, an obedient wife and mother of four children. In the other, where she is Pat, love and children come later, after she's established an ardor for Italy and a satisfying teaching career. In both, Patricia is an inspiringly open-minded, grounded, active woman, and it's a pleasure to watch her adapt to her circumstances as the novel swings her through time. Her rights and role as a woman shift depending on the choice she made, but that choice is accompanied by larger changes in the world around her as well. Unsettlingly, neither landscape is quite recognizable. Midcentury touch points develop in unfamiliar ways--concerns regarding nuclear power and its misuse loom large for Pat, whereas the International Space Station on the moon becomes a marvel to Tricia. Both lives have their share of affecting triumphs and tragedies, with the themes of family and partnership woven evenly throughout. Walton is a straightforward, unsparing writer, and she strikes a poignant balance between the ideas of agency and fate. Science fiction elements add an eerie complexity to these deeply felt portraits.

        COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        April 15, 2014
        Every life has pivotal turning points at which a single decision can change the whole course of a life. In 1949, Patricia Cowen's boyfriend asks her to marry him. Yes or no? One life or another? In a fascinating opening scene we meet Patricia living in a nursing home and suffering from dementia but remembering both possible lives she might have experienced. In one, she is called Trish, marries Mark, and has four children but an unhappy marriage. In the other, she goes by Pat, doesn't marry Mark, but meets Bee and finds love and happiness. Patricia not only has unique accomplishments in the two lives, but the world she inhabits is completely different, making this personal story into a low-key alternate history as well. VERDICT Walton ("Among Others") is a beautiful writer although the very linear narrative of Pat's and Trish's marching along in tandem sometimes feels like a laundry list of life milestones. The subtle nature of the "what if?" could make this book a hit with literary fiction fans who enjoyed Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life".

        Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        May 15, 2016

        Dementia obscures some memories and reveals others for octogenarian Patricia Cowan. Two lives, two families diverge from a single choice. Which life should she have lived, and which did she really experience? VERDICT Readers of character-driven speculative fiction will appreciate the importance Walton places on personal moments of consequence as well as on those that change the wider world. (LJ 4/15/15)

        Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity
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shortDescription

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know-what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.
Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War-those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post...

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      • value: Stonewall Honor Book Award
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Tor Publishing Group
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      • description: Fiction / Science Fiction / General
      • code: FIC040000
      • description: Fiction / Alternative History