Trace Elements by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

OMG this book was like it was written just for me!

For starters, I love Jo Walton’s books. I first encountered her in 2013, when I checked Among Others out from the library - I knew it had won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards and I wanted to see what it was about.  I was in love with this book.  I loved the protagonist and I loved the magic.  I remember reading through the section on how the narrator thought she had used magic to conjure up the book club at the library and then I turn the page and found a bookmark that some previous reader had left in this library book I was reading. The bookmark turned out to be a torn our page from her day calendar. The day of the calendar page was the day of my first child’s birth. This only made the book feel more magical.

So when My Real Children came out, I borrowed from the library and I also loved it. And then I found out about her Thessaly books.  As a lapsed classicist who loves robots, time travel, and Greek mythology, this seemed like the perfect book for me. And it was! I devoured the series and was thrilled to be able to meet Ms. Walton at a bookstore in Brooklyn for her book tour of the third volume, during which I got her to sign all three books in the series. 

Also on that book tour with her was Ada Palmer, who had just come out with her first book, Too Like The Lightning. I enjoyed that, but the writing style was a little too archaic for my tastes. I tried picking up book two in that series as an audiobook but I couldn’t focus on it. 

Sometime around this time I found Jo Walton’s nonfiction essays on tor dot com. I loved them! They reminded me of the parts of Among Others where the protagonist talked about books. I happily bought and devoured her nonfiction essay collections What Makes This Book So Great and An Informal History of the Hugos. 

So when I saw this book on NetGalley I just had to request it! A nonfiction book about science fiction by two great writers? And I was right to be so excited! This book was excellent- I could not put it down! I learned so many fascinating things from it and the writing style made it a page turner from beginning to end. I may have become slightly insufferable when I kept sharing cool tidbits of the things l learned from this book with my wife, like the reasons why mass market paperbacks have the page inside about torn off covers and how the size of spinner racks dictated novel length in the 20th century. 

If this book doesn’t win Best Related Work at the Hugos next year I will be quite surprised!