This book has such an intriguing concept. As a writer of fiction myself, I often speak of my characters (at least the ones who get to share their narrative) as if they have their own agency and consciousness... inside my head. She has a secret that she won't tell me. He is very forthcoming today. It is mind blowing to read these things taken a leap ahead.

The writing style and concept were good. The author was worthy of her Hugo and Nebula awards and nominations.

I dived into this novel having this high expectation. But I felt belittle when it comes to literature and classical art.

I just can't get through in the story. Facts and citations are amazing but I myself haven't read a lot of historical books which sums up these books. It has so many historical citations that even I didn't get or even comprehend.

There are also citations from books that I haven't read which lessen the experience for me.

I received an this as an e-book from netgalley to review. Thank you to the publisher and author.

This is an interesting novel that examines a fascinating idea - the reality of the characters written by an author. Considering the longevity of some characters throughout fiction: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and almost all of Shakespeare, it’s a clever conceit to explore.

I enjoyed the book with all its references to Shakespeare - here we have the cast of Twelfth Night - clearly with its allusion to Shakespeare’s alternative title. We also have Miranda from The Tempest and Caliban and they all live in a renaissance Florence that is in Illyria/Thalia. They’ve never moved on from the renaissance- in fact no progress is allowed and we meet these characters and explore this world.

On the other hand we also follow the ‘author’ who wrote the sequel to Twelfth Night and the character - our narrator - who she created and who has been various people in her various novels. He wishes to tell her life story and his part in it so that it is written down, so when she dies she won’t be dead and neither will he.

So we have these two stories alternating.

I found the parts with Sylvia (the writer) brilliant. Vividly described and emotive. I felt a strong connection with her and the story of her growing up, relations with her grandparents and parents well considered and developed. It was often beautifully written. Her interest in Florence and the way that city was painted was particularly successful.

I know nothing about the renaissance so those bits were really interesting. The ideas of these people able and willing to change their worlds.

I felt the links to Shakespearean characters were less good although I loved that characters from other plays are mentioned - Tybalt/Claudio etc - it was chocced full of Shakespeare Easter Eggs - as well as those that were characters in the novel.

But I’m unsure of the value of them within the scope of the novel - they don’t play themselves as in from the plays apart from general similarities to their original Shakespearean characters. We don’t need them to be Shakespearean - they could be any characters in a world created by a writer.

That part of the story is also rather weak - so they are faced with a disaster and a potential war but it is all fixed by a conversation? It doesn’t really go anywhere.

Over all there are two stories here. One works well and could work well without being joined to the more fantastical elements. The links to Shakespeare are rather forced and pointless and this part of the story is tied up too neatly and without character development. The plot is weak here.

This could be a sequence of novels or just more deeply explored in this one book. It had too many characters and ideas vying for space.

It’s an interesting read so I give it 4 stars and it is something I’d recommend to A’level students.

I am so conflicted on how I feel about this book. On the one side, this book had a brilliant idea. The writing was absolutely gorgeous, and I loved the parts of the book that discussed the author and her relationship with her main character (or imaginary friend); it was so unique. I also really enjoyed that, using the elements I loved, the book was extremely meta and I absolutely needed to finish the book on that feeling alone. Additionally, this book is heavily influenced by Shakespeare, Italy and the Renaissance, and Montreal - like hello, can this be more me. However, despite all that worked for me, the plot of the novel really held it back. Like mentioned, the meta parks were entirely captivating, but the main plot of the "book within a book" was really boring, and there is no nicer way of saying it. It kind of worked towards the end of the novel, and I enjoyed how Walton tied the two storylines together. This being said, I am really enthralled by Walton's writing (this was my first read of hers!), so I will definitely picking up more from her super soon.

I usually enjoy mortification and books about books, and the summary for this sounded like it could be fantastic. Unfortunately, Or What You Will by John Walton never quite worked out for me. I didn't find myself getting attached to any of the characters or becoming particularly invested in the story either. I will say that of everything I did like the imaginary friend sequences, but I was oddly not at all into the Shakespearean things at all.

I have spent so much time highlighting portions of this book because it is so beautifully written.

"Or What You Will" is unapologetically meta. I loved reading parts of it to my husband out loud- in fact, I maaaaaay have woken up in the middle of the night, grabbed the book and woken my husband to listen to me read it to him. He did a great job pretending to be interested in it before going to sleep. ;) This is a book that is best read slowly in order to enjoy it. There are many historical stories, historical references, and an understanding that the reader has some Shakespearean background. While you don't have to have read "The Tempest" or "Twelfth Night" to enjoy this book, knowing them will help understand more of the references that Walton makes.

This is my second experience reading a book by Jo Walton- I read "Tooth and Claw" and fell in love with it. "Or What you Will" has a completely different feel, but Jo Walton has a poetic way with words in both of her stories I've read. It makes me want to immediately read more of her works.

This is not a book that everyone will enjoy. I (obviously) loved it. If you read a sample of this book and enjoy it, most of the book reads the same way and you will likely love it too. The ending was what the author was building up to the whole time, so it was expected and predictable- but in a good way.

Thank you Netgalley and Tor Books for an advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This was the kind of feel-good, one shot fantasy that I needed in my life!

DNF'd at 62%

This book is very gorgeously written, and explores some very fascinating concepts, but admittedly I don't think that this book is for me. I am positive that other people will really love this one though. The book expects a lot of prior knowledge of the fantasy genre, of Shakespeare, of history, of literature in general. This is a book that you will get lost in, and while sometimes getting lost in a story is a very exciting and fun experience, in this case I was just left very confused through most of it.

Whatever you think this book is going to be, you’re wrong.

Or at least, I was very wrong about this book. I was hoping… I’m not sure, exactly, but I was incredibly excited about the idea of a book about a muse. About the avatar of someone’s imagination, their creativity.

And it’s true that this is about a muse. But it’s not really about the muse.

To be honest, I really struggled with this one. I started it in March, when I received the arc, and just finished it now, in June. I got bored. Jo Walton’s writing tends to be slow and kind of luxurious, but here it feels pretty rambly. And in fairness I think that’s on purpose; the nameless muse narrates in first-person, and real people don’t speak perfectly and concisely all the time. They ramble a bit, they wander, they backtrack. It gives Or What You Will the sense that you really are being spoken to by a real person, which is kind of vital, because one of the very first things the narrative needs to do is convince the reader that the muse is a real person, something far more complicated than just a figment of Sylvia’s imagination.

Sylvia, of course, being the writer whose head the muse lives inside. The two are aware of each other; they talk to each other directly, although Sylvia is a little confused or dismayed by the muse’s insistence that he’s as real as she is. We’re not real in the same way, she tells him, seeming a little worried that he – the nameless muse is very much male – thinks that they are. But it’s pretty clear that he’s a lot more than a delusion, or an imaginary friend. As we get more and more of their story – their story, not just the book they’re writing together, but their entwined past together, the journey of Sylvia’s life and how intrinsic the muse has been to it – well. We talk about how writers need to write, storytellers need to tell stories, but this isn’t that. Their relationship, Sylvia’s and her muse, isn’t that.

It’s life or death.

And life or death is what Or What You Will revolves around: the muse doesn’t want to die when Sylvia does. The only solution, it seems, is for Sylvia not to die at all. But she lives in our world, the real world, where dying is (at least at this point in history) an inevitability. So how are they going to get around this?

I say ‘they’, but Sylvia’s not really in on the plan from the beginning. It’s more like she’s indulging the muse, letting him try this ridiculous thing. But bit by bit, she gets on board.

This is…a slow book. A meandering one. I’m not that sure I enjoyed it, but I kept turning the pages, because there’s something so…luxurious? About it. And that’s deliberate, the story Sylvia and her muse are writing is set in a world that froze during the Renaissance, and there’s a big deal made about the joyful artistic decadence of that time period, about the mindset of it. Sylvia is in Italy while she writes her book (the book, the one meant to defeat her death), and there’s so much…I want to call it hedonism, but that doesn’t seem quite right; it’s more that Sylvia is embracing all the pleasures available to her, the food and the culture and the art, revelling in it all but in a way that seems…not holy, not sanctimonious, but not gluttonous, either? It’s balanced on the line between, perfectly healthy and beautiful. It’s a quiet delight to read, which is as it should be, because it’s quiet delight that Walton is capturing in her writing.

There’s two stories going on, side by side; Sylvia’s in Italy, talking to her muse, and Dolly and Tish’s, the two Brits in Sylvia’s book who get swept into the world of one of her earlier books. I’ll be honest; I did not care about Dolly and Tish’s story. At all. It was scattered through with historical figures, and some from Shakespeare’s plays – like Miranda, Calibran, etc – and mostly seemed to exist at all to explain to the reader how the escaping-death thing was going to work. It was a lot of talking, a lot of telling. None of the characters appealed to me. I didn’t care. It was boring as heck with very contrived worldbuilding, and although that’s explained – Sylvia winces and talks about how she’d have done much better if she was crafting this fictional world ‘today’, rather than at the start of her career – it’s still pretty meh.

However, Sylvia’s own story is much more…grabbing. And emotional. Painful at times, but powerful, and rich, and moving. And happily, Or What You Will spends a lot more time with Sylvia and her muse than it does with Dolly and Tish, so it works out pretty okay.

This isn’t going on my favourites shelf; it’s certainly not my favourite of Walton’s works. But it’s a pretty solid book, and I think a lot of people will enjoy it, especially if you approach it looking for something slow and luxurious, rather than action-heavy and fast-paced.

Jo Walton's newest novel, Or What You Will, is inventive, original, fantastical in every sense of the word, richly referential, and a fascinating read from start to finish. It tells the story of a story, threading together the biography of award-winning fantasy novelist Sylvia Harrison, facing her own mortality and what she will leave behind, and Sylvia's work in progress, a Shakespeare-influenced fantasy set in an Italian Renaissance world in which she last wrote decades earlier. Both stories weave in and out of one another through the voice of an unnamed impish narrator, Sylvia's imaginary friend and muse. This muse is facing his own mortality along with Sylvia's, since, if someone dies, what happens to the characters trapped inside their minds? Unlike Sylvia, though, our narrator has a plan to avoid mortality altogether.

Walton's splendidly metafictional work takes the architecture of a novel and opens it up for everyone to see. Everything that inspires a character or plot twist or detail of setting, every piece of research that goes into crafting a pseudo-historical fantasy world - it's all laid bare before the reader, with the fantasy novel a translucent film on top of the suddenly visible bones of reality, research, history both personal and global, of literary tropes and personal biases, of all the pieces of reality that feed into even - perhaps especially - the most fantastical of stories.

Late into the book, Walton, via her nameless narrator, describes a pair of portraits which feature cartoons on the reverse side of the canvas. The narrator remarks on the museum’s new display for them, which reveals those reversals, saying, “It’s strange and delightful to see a picture you have seen a thousand times, and suddenly be able to see the secret hidden behind it.”

This is the spirit of Or What You Will: the strange and delightful magic of reading a fantasy book, a story with all the story tropes and character archetypes and world-building conventions so familiar to fantasy readers, and suddenly have it unfold into a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the author’s inner workings, the wealth of research that informs every tiny reference or choice, the realities that inspire the fantasies. Yet Or What You Will is not just a documentary on how a fantasy novelist writes her books, just as the drawings on the portraits’ flip sides are not merely a sketch for the better-known front. It weaves the overt contextualization and exposed structure of real history and “real” author biography in and out of the fantastical, but typical enough for easy recognition, story of dukes and wizards and portal crossings from one world to another. Each is enhanced by the other, the suddenly revealed secret side casting the better-known front in a new, starker, light, and the carefully crafted fantasy rendering what might be the dull history of a city’s paving stones and wall repairs and a bleak personal biography of abuse into a copper-bright piece of magic.

The thread tying these two worlds together, the canvas between them, is the narrative voice, Sylvia’s imaginary friend and muse, the frequently recurring character - her nameless messenger of the gods. His (to arbitrarily select a gender) presence is constant, as he is the narrator, but occasionally forgotten, when the reader is lulled back into the usual feeling of reading a book, passively offered by a non-personalized provider of words. Then he re-emerges, to remind us that he’s always been there - after all, the story is being told, so someone is telling it. When the text directs the reader to “Imagine spending a day there...” that imperative comes from someone. The judgment of “All Italian ingredients are better than ingredients anywhere else,“ the artistic appraisal of a well-described sunset or scoop of gelato, are not somehow objective or universal - there is a voice, and therefore a consciousness, behind it all. This isn’t a new twist Walton came up with for Or What You Will - this is how novels, written in this common narrative voice, work, whether we take that narrative voice for the author, some god or providence in the characters’ world that controls their fates, or this muse of fire, a Greek chorus relating and commenting on the action, but no less present and capable of agency and independent thought for all that.

It’s an approach that I’ve seen more often done in theatre, which is in some ways its natural home (perhaps one reason why the fantasy world in Harrison’s story leans so much on Shakespeare’s oeuvre) and somewhat less frequently in literature, but for a book that so relishes its referential nature, let’s have a few references: Or What You Will is reminiscent of Calvino, of Oyeyemi, of Stoppard and Sondheim (sorry, back to theatre), of Edward Eager in his enthusiastic in-text gratitude toward E. Nesbit, and of every classic fantasy writer you can think of who took some real-world culture or piece of history for their inspiration and spun a yarn that alleges to be fantastical but is inextricably tangled up in all their own real biases and egoism. (For the wry comment on vaguely drawn “exotic” fantasy cultures that smash thousands of years and many disparate cultures into a sketchy realm of magic carpets and sand, this Iranian American reader is grateful.) And Walton knows whereof she writes, since she's as much the highly awarded, famous-in-a-certain-circle fantasy novelist as her on-page surrogate, Sylvia.

Yet Walton is also marvelous at writing reality like it’s fantasy - the unbelievably delicious “wish fulfillment narrative” of Teatro del Sale’s food and function, the world-building offered in real historical details of cities both Italian and Canadian, the escape of a portal fantasy in Sylvia’s move from abuse in Montreal to self-actualisation in Florence. Sometimes reality is fantastic. Sometimes fantasy is based on reality. Maybe, sometimes, through stories, through fantasies, we can leave Plato’s cave and emerge into a world where if a thing is perfect, “they have it there, and they always have,” a world where death comes as a chosen sacrifice, not an arbitrary horror. Where time stands still and perfection persists. Where to exist in a story is to exist forever, read and reread and immortal on the page.

A book that feels like magic. Describing the feeling or stories within a book and how they interact with the world. A meta book that leaves the reader thinking afterwards about what they just read. Definitely one to watch.

This is a tough book to review because ultimately it ended up not being for me. I definitely think that Or What You Will has a unique idea at its core that would be hard for a lot of authors to pull off,and I do think that Jo Walton nailed it. What it would come down to is whether or not you will enjoy the experience of reading it and for me the answer was no,unfortunately.
We go between two stories:the one in the real world where we follow the author Sylvia and her muse,the unnamed narrator, and the one in world from Sylvia's earlier works, Ilyria,where immortality is possible and where the characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Twelve Night continue to live beyond their plays.
The Tempest is my favorite play and I was hoping that chapters from Ilyria would be interesting to read about. But it wasn't so much about Shakespeare as it was about the history of Florence and its artists. And I mean a lot of history. And so the chapters that I thought would be the most interesting ended up being the most boring ones.
The chapters from the real world are a character study. In order for Sylvia and the narrator to become characters in Ilyria we as readers need to know every little detail about them, especially the secrets and fears. Some of it was really interesting, especially the relationship between the author and her muse, but for the most part it also did not spark any joy from reading this book.
Some stories are for you and some are not. This was simply not for me,even though I realize all the good things in it.
Thank you to Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Let me start by saying that I do not feel equal to reviewing this book. Jo Walton is a significantly better writer than I am a reviewer. I am very tempted to write simply, “Read this. Find out for yourself how you like it. Even if you don’t like it, reading it will have been worth your time if you are someone who likes books and reading.” But that would not be a helpful review. I’m not sure I can write a helpful review. See my opening words. But I’ll try.

The book’s narrator is an oft-used figment of a writer’s imagination that the writer is deliberately choosing not to use in her next work because she fears he has been over-used. Walton covers a great deal of the history of Italy, but also assumes a certain level of knowledge on the part of the reader, or at least a certain ability to investigate for oneself those things which were not already known. Somehow this does not feel like being left in the dark when Walton does it, as being encouraged to turn on a light. I really don’t know how she manages that, but I’m impressed. It also incorporates a great many Shakespearean characters, as part of the author character’s oeuvre.

Walton herself describes this as a playful fantasy novel about death and subcreation. I must say, I find “subcreation” a superior term to describe writing about the underpinnings of writing than “metafiction.” Naturally, it is one Tolkien utilized for the action or process of creating a fully realized and internally consistent imaginary (or secondary) world. But there are nuances (always, with both Walton and Tolkien!), and the conceit of having a character be aware of their status as an oft-used figment of a writer’s imagination, addressing a reader directly and discussing books and literature and their own role in that world is undoubtedly metafiction, just as much as it is subcreation.

The death Walton alludes to in her Thanks and Notes is present throughout the tale, both in the world of the narrator and his author as well as in the world they are creating as they tell a final story together. In the author’s world death is discussed in the events we are all familiar with because it is the death we all know, but in her creation death is quite a different thing, and even the death of a character (not the narrator) who was never intended to be important, becomes a significant event in the tale, which quickly grows convoluted, spanning worlds and eras, wavering between fantasy and reality.

Although this is not a long book, it is not a quick read. Walton draws her readers in with snippets of story, or history, or thoughts on the nature of books and those who love them, but it is no simple thing, as a reader, to switch quickly between these different things, nor to breeze through reading them. Indeed, to do so would be a disservice to Walton’s text, which even at its most academic still manages to evoke the Portuguese saudade for the world the reader has been invited to glimpse but cannot truly occupy. Many of Walton’s works, like those of Guy Gavriel Kay, produce this feeling in me. It is a mark of her incredible talent as a writer.

Read this book. It is worth it.

Unique so involving a blend of fiction and non fiction that will keep you reading guessing. Jo Walton Has an original style of writing that never fails to draw me in.Highly recommend her latest book.#netgalley #orwhatyouwill

"Or What You Will" is a captivating book with an original premise. Jo Walton has crafted a really great story and I look forward to more of her work. Highly recommended.

I believe that there are other worlds—but not in the same way that physicists hypothesize. I believe that, when we read, we bring stories to life for as long as the tale holds our attention. The stories that we keep reading are the ones that are the most alive because we carry iconic characters like Sherlock Holmes and Hamlet around in our heads. After reading Jo Walton’s meditative, experimental Or What You Will, I suspect that Walton has similar beliefs.

Or What You Will is a curious hybrid of a novel. One strand is pure metafiction. Author Sylvia Harrison converses with a nameless entity that functions as muse and personal morale booster. This entity, which she discovered as a child on the day of her grandmother’s funeral, has played a part in every novel Sylvia has written. The other strand is populated by characters from Twelfth Night and The Tempest, historical figures, and characters from Sylvia’s own novels. We learn in just a few chapters that this other strand is the plot of the novel that Sylvia and her muse are working on. We also learn that this untitled novel will be Sylvia’s last one, as her cancer has returned.

Sylvia’s unnamed muse has a plan to help them both avoid death, but it involves two impossible things. The first impossible thing is, of course, not dying. The second impossible thing is crossing over to a place where impossible things like not dying are a reality: Illyria, the country that Sylvia invented for her first books. The muse’s plans mean that it and Sylvia think and talk about death a lot. Is it necessary? What doe death mean?What does immortality mean? Is literary fame an acceptable version of immortality?

Meanwhile, in Illyria, the characters think about death in a very different way. Because they only die if they or another person will it, people can live for centuries. Their long lifespans mean that they can pursue intellectual, artistic, and magical careers, if they like. The price they pay for all this time is that they don’t have Progress. Illyria is stuck in the Renaissance; any technology invented after the 1500s doesn’t work. The long lifespans also have another, perhaps unsurprising, consequence. In a world where people live so long, it’s just a matter of time before old enemies show up for revenge.

Its fun to see Orsino, Miranda, and Caliban again and figure out Walton’s intellectual puzzles. Nothing in Or What You Will is what I expected. I think some readers might fault this book for being too much of a thought experiment. I’ll concede that this book takes a few chapters to find its feet, but I enjoyed the opportunity to think about the lives and realities of fiction. Most of all, I love the thought that the worlds that authors create are out there, floating and occasionally brushing up against our world when those authors put out another book or a reader opens the pages. How amazing would it be if we could literally escape into a beloved fictional country, instead of just metaphorically?

This book was such a nice read. There's a lot of layers to this book and some of them will somewhat escape you if you don't know about them, but that doesn't take anything away from the story.
I found the way this book was written to be very captivating. I loved this take on the relationship between a writer and one of their characters and the connection between them is told in a way that's so intimate, that it makes you feel like you're invading their space at times. Perhaps it's because of my own artistic side that I could understand it so well, but I think the way this story is written will appeal to everyone.
I'm overjoyed that I got to read this book and will definitely recommend it to anyone searching for a feel-good read that allows you to explore the author/characters relationship.

Or What You Will is the next book by prolific award wining science fiction and fantasy author, Jo Walton. I have.....loved some of Walton's work (The Just City, Necessity) and disliked others (The Philosopher Kings, Tooth and Claw). Her most awarded novel, Among Others is one of the first books I reviewed for this blog, and I merely enjoyed it but didn't love it. Still, Of What You Will has drawn comparisons already to Among Others for good reasons - like that book, it's often incredibly explicitly referential to the genre itself, and features a story (in part) of a person trying to escape past trauma that changed her life.

Unfortunately, I don't think it works nearly as well as it did in Among Others. Whereas that novel featured a clear plot progression for its character that was the core of the story, Of What You Will essentially tries to work in two or three plots - a meta one about a SF/F author and her imaginary friend/muse trying desperately to find a way to keep her alive and a related fantasy plot told by the author and friend using characters from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (from which this book's title comes) and The Tempest. And then there's frequent asides about the beauty and wonder of renaissance Italy. It's a testament to Walton's craft that all of these individual elements work on their own, but the combination of them just didn't seem to work for me and felt more confusing than anything.

The above is kind of a bad explanation but I'll try to explain better after the jump:

Trigger Warning: Physical/Spousal Abuse, Parental Neglect.
---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------

Sylvia Harrison is a renowned science fiction and fantasy writer, with 30 novels to her name as well as several of the major awards. Now alone, after the death of her beloved husband, Sylvia vacations to live in Italy to gain inspiration for her newest novel - a return to her Renaissance and Shakespearean inspired setting that formed the basis of her first trilogy of novels. All seems well for Sylvia as she returns to the world perpetually stuck in the renaissance, filled with famous characters like Miranda and Orsino.

But Sylvia's life was not so easy for the first part of her life, from the time she grew up under a neglectful mother to the time she married a controlling husband - both of whom were abusive. The one thing that saved her was....."him" - her secret for her entire life. "He" has no name, but has been in the background of her mind for much of her life, only showing himself to the world when she puts him into her novels as various an often significant characters. But when Sylvia, now age 73, dies, he obviously must die too.

Or must he? And so begins his plan to try and use her own storytelling, her own life, and the art of the renaissance to find a way to survive - for both himself and Sylvia - forever.

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Or What You Will is a weird novel because it contains multiple layers of narrative and switches between them sometimes at a moment, with it often being a bit confusing how exactly the narrator's plan is supposed to work - and honestly it never gets less confusing. The layers of narrative are basically as follows:

Layer 1. Narrator telling the background and history of Science Fiction/Fantasy writer Sylvia Harrison, the woman in whose head he resides, and who comments back against parts of his narrative (since she can hear it).

Layer 1.5? Narrator describes wonders of the renaissance and stories from it, some of which forms the basis for the setting of several of Sylvia's fictional books.

Layer 2: A story in Sylvia's pseudo-renaissance setting, featuring characters from Twelfth Night and The Tempest as well as a pair of brand new characters brought into this world from 19th century Europe.

Layer 1.5 is just sort of there, I guess as a way for Walton to infodump fun stories about the Renaissance, but honestly adds practically nothing to this book, with the main focus of this book being the interaction between layers 1 and 2 - as the nameless Narrator is attempting to use a combination of the two layers to ensure Sylvia's survival somehow....and thus his own survival. As such Layer 2 is only important really to that end - or to the extent it leads to Sylvia coming to some revelations about her views on life and the renaissance - a revelation that can best be summed up as "stasis in utopia isn't a utopia, as without progress it's no longer special."

The result is that all of the characters and conflicts in Layer 2 really don't matter - and while they're interesting to read, it's pretty clear that's the case from early on in this book, so you either care about events the book doesn't - in which case you'll be disappointed as the book's resolution of them is hilarious - or you will eventually wonder why those events really exist.

By contrast Layer 1 is very much the Among Others-esque plot you might expect from the plot summary and other reviews, in which the narrator through a non-linear narrative describes Sylvia's childhood and early life of struggling with abuse, and how she eventually managed to get through it all. Like in Among Others, this Layer starts out very referential to the genre although that goes away for the most part as the story moves on, and features a character in Sylvia trying to get through events of the past, events she has largely put behind her. There is some strong work in this layer and some strong themes, as Walton uses this narrative to reject the idea that an abused person cannot get through those experiences and come out okay on the other side - injured perhaps but not broken. Moreover, Walton doesn't fall into the trap of accidentally arguing that those horrible experiences may have had a positive result in the end (and thus had some value) - in fact this concept is explicitly rejected by Sylvia in the text. But Watson is making the case here that there is a path to a happier life for people with such experiences and they should not be given up on, and should be helped if at all possible.

This is the strongest theme and part of this novel, and it's tough to read but it works. But the way Walton tries to merge it with Sylvia's attempts to go on after the death of her second husband and Layer 2 just seems confusing at best - with Sylvia attempting to explain to the narrator for most of the book why it can't work to actually give her immortality, only for her to then later....accept it and then it....works (this is not really a spoiler so I don't mind describing it)? Again, all of this is done with excellent craft, and when parts in layers are dropped like a stone just to ensure we can get on with the ending Walton wants, she manages to make that work (like I said, it's hilarious) somehow, but like....when I look back at it, I just keep asking: What was the point? And honestly, I don't know.

Or What You Will was one of my first forays into metafiction and I absolutely loved it. Combined with Shakespeare? Incredible. While reading, I felt that I was peeking over Walton’s shoulder, getting a master class on writing, and watching the threads of a story being woven right before my eyes. This is a story filled with succinct observations, fantastic characters, and reflective moments. I do think you will probably get more out of this story if you are familiar with The Tempest, Twelfth Night, or have an interest in reading about the craft of storytelling.

This isn't a casual novel- it is definitely a commitment, a choice. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it very much was mine. Or What You Will is creative, original, and has a unique story to tell. I’m looking forward to re-reading this book, as it is full of rich details and stunning descriptions. This was the first book I’ve read from Jo Walton, but it won’t be my last.

Or What You Will releases on July 7, 2020. Thank you to Jo Walton, Tor Books, and Netgalley for a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Or What You Will by Jo Walton (TOR/Forge, July 2020) is pure delight for the literary-minded—doubly so for writers and lovers of SFF. This book uses well known tales from the Western canon (most notably Shakespeare, but certainly others, too) to share the story of a—Shall we call him a character? Or a muse?—seeking to slip the leash of mortality by escaping the head of the aging author who created him. He’ll have to do it out the back way, of course, by slipping from her skull-prison and into one of her stories . . . but there’s a catch. In order for him to be truly immortal, the author herself can never die. And so he will have to take her with him.

Walton’s writing is as lush and juicy as it’s ever been, transforming this nostalgic and meandering tale into a rich, sensory-filled experience readers will want to relish slowly, and all at once. I agree with many reviewers who say that “experienced” readers will enjoy this book the most, especially those familiar with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Or What You Will) as the title heavily suggests. However, even though I was not familiar with every story referenced in the book, I still found the journey incredibly enjoyable—probably because I spent it rolling around in Walton’s luscious language.

I was given an eARC of this title by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions are mine, as always.

A strange and wonderful combination of all my favorite aspects of Walton’s writing. Walton’s latest combines her fantasy and non-fiction writing in such an interesting way that I found myself (happily) trying to find out what was true and what was created for the story. This quirky, meta love letter to Florence, Shakespeare, and writing will definitely not be for everyone, but if any of those things appeal you should give this a try. There’s a spark of an idea that wants to continue and wants his aged writer to continue forever as well, and he has a plan to share with her and readers, if only she’ll let him enact it.