With "Among Others" Jo Walton either took a big risk or made a very smart decision. Or both, I can't decide. 
 When the book start the main event of the story has already taken place: our heroine, Mori, is recovering from a car accident caused by her deranged mother which cost the life of her twin sister. 
 For the main part of the book the details about this car crash are vague, a few hints are dropped about Mori and her sisters being involved with fairies and their mother being an evil witch but magic remains an evanescent concept (no wands, no spells) which could easily pass as "destiny" or "coincidence" if you don't believe in it. 
 So you see the risk and why many fantasy readers were disappointed, they missed the action, they missed the spectacular duels. 
 On the other hand this book is a huge love declaration to SF and fantasy literature since Mori is a voracious reader and in the course of the novel she goes through all the classic of the genre (Heinlein, Le Guin, Delany, Vonnegut...), extensively commenting them. By doing this Walton openly flirts with all the SF lovers and many of them appreciated the effort and immediately fell in love with the book. 
 I can relate with the feeling, I love books where others books are protagonist but I think that stressing this characteristic of "Among Others" in some way understate this novel reducing it to a mere list of beloved classics while it is so much more. 
 First of all Mori doesn't just read the books, she lives them. The protagonists of her novels are real, not in a delusional way but so that she can relate with their experience, question her behavior and her way of thinking according to what she learns from them, use them to better understand reality and the relationships with adults and with her peers. 
 And here we come to the main quality of this book. Mori is healing in many ways: she is crippled and in constant pain, she has just lost her twin sister and after escaping an abusing mother she has to leave Wales for England where the father she has never met before sends her to an obnoxious boarding school making her feel more dejected than ever. What the girl ha to do is learn again to live with other people, construct new relationship with her new relatives and learn to form new friendship. This is a slow and painful healing process which Mori overcomes with the help of her beloved books and also a little bit of magic so it's not true that nothing happens in this story, every day is a huge conquest, every small event is a valuable experience. 
 For once I appreciated the first person narration in the form of diary entries, not only because it helps the understanding of the character evolution but especially because Mori is such a lovely character it is beautiful being in her head. She is only fifteen but she is a very gifted person, not only because of her involvement with magic, so she doesn't not express herself like the mentally retarded troll we are used to read in many YA novels. Her suffering is real and touching even if her disposition doesn't claim pity and her struggle to understand love, sex, marriage as well as feminism and politics help to create a complex coming-of-age character. 
 Personally I also liked the "light touch" with magic which reminds so much of Tolkien (and actually Mori refers to Tolkien as someone who really understood magic), the contrast with the still unspoiled Wales were fairies can be easily met and the more civilized England were elves are rarer and more diffident and especially the fact magic could be easily justified as a series of coincidences. For the main part of the book I really think that it was all in her head, a way to cope with the loss and grief. 
 Besides in these years were boarding schools are all fashionably cool, in an harrypotterish way, I appreciated a boarding school which really looked like itself, snotty classmates and horrible food included. 
 And the ending, which has been so much contested for me it's genius, a real coup de theatre totally unexpected but much needed.