Review: My Real Children by Jo Walton

My Real Children

Jo Walton

320 pages

Published in May 2014 by Tor Books

Source: Public Library

If there were two worlds, then what caused her to slide between them? They weren’t two times as they were for Charlotte. It was the same year, whichever year it was. It was just that things were different, things that shouldn’t have been different. She had four children, or three. . . Had she made a choice that could have gone two ways and thereafter had two lives?

It’s 2015 and an eighty-something year old Patricia Cowan is losing her memory. Not only is she losing her memory, but she’s remembers things that couldn’t have possibly happened. She remembers having a life with Bee and being mom to three kids, but she also never met Bee and instead married Mark and had four living kids. Nuclear bombs were dropped on Miami and in the other life, this never happened. As Patricia looks back on her lives, she wonders why did these two lives come down to one seemingly innocent decision she made in the past. My Real Children is a wonderful exploration about the choices we make in life that can affect not just ourselves but the world.

Jo Walton takes the question of ‘what if?’ and explores it in depth. It’s probably a question many of us have asked ourselves throughout our lives. I found myself fascinated and pulled in to Patricia’s lives from the first few pages. Her lives were vastly different from each other with just a few connecting strands. The two Patricias (Pat in one life, Trish in the other) found love and joy in almost unrecognizable ways.

This book has been compared to Life After Life by Kate Atkinson with My Real Children being the clear winner. Since I haven’t read Life After Life, I can’t tell you which is better. I can say that after reading My Real Children, I need to go and read more books by Jo Walton. My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars.