Getting better all the time...

Yesterday was the first time I wrote since my cat, Soul, got sick on the first of March.  *happy sigh*

Jo Walton (Women's Month)

I had originally planned to recommend Jo Walton's Among Others on my birthday, sort of in a saving one of the best for my special day kind of a way. Hopefully everything I'm recommending is fantastic, but this one is exceptionally good. It's an urban fantasy where magic may or may not exist: the protagonist believes in it, but even she admits it's subtle and easy to miss if you don't believe. The main character, a science fiction fan, is reading books I discovered and loved as I grew up, making me want to run out and read them again. And it's about being an outsider, which shouldn't be something everybody relates to, but I certainly do.

Here's an excerpt that discusses how magic works in this universe:

This morning, I discovered what the fairy meant by “find” and “danger.” The post brought a letter from my mother.

            I don't know how finding the fairy let her know where I was. The world doesn't work in  a nice logical way. The fairies wouldn't have told her, and while there were people who might have, they might have done it at any time. What I think is that she was looking for me. Being in a strange landscape and with all new stuff I'd have been hard to catch hold of—I have nothing but the cane and a handful of things of my own here, and the things of mine that she has will mostly be fading by now. But by opening myself to call the fairy, I drew her attention. Maybe that made someone give her my address, or maybe she came to know of it directly. That doesn't matter. You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is. It's like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn't mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn't because you did the magic.