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  • My Real Children

  • By: Jo Walton
  • Narrated by: Alison Larkin
  • Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (18 ratings)

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My Real Children

By: Jo Walton
Narrated by: Alison Larkin
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Summary

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know - what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.

Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War - those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?

Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives... and of how every life means the entire world.​

©2014 Jo Walton (P)2014 Audible Inc.
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What listeners say about My Real Children

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

One person, two lives.

The story starts with someone quite confused and forgetful, senile, who seems to remember living two completely different lives with completely different people. By the end, we hear all about both lives and the pivotal decision that forked the way, all the love and pain in different measures, all the different people that became family, the different sociopolitical developments in the world as well as the personal ones. Each life seems good and fulfilling in different ways, all the children from each life are equally loved. Is it really possible to decide which life is better?

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A thought experiment

Jo Walton’s writing is exquisite and the story/stories is/was engaging and interesting. Neither Patricia’s story was exactly our world and history, they each were altered subtly at first and then more rapidly with more differences. It was fascinating to follow Walton’s thought experiment how a single answer could change life so dramatically.
As you can see from my differentiated Star ratings for the narrator’s performance and the story, that I was not happy with the narration. In a book where Italy and the Italian language play such an important role, you would think that they would a) choose someone who had previous knowledge of the language or b) ensure that the Italian was pronounced correctly. As it turned out Alison Larkin and her editors had/did neither. It was painful to listen to and brought me out of the story each time she mispronounced a word or name, and not just because of an English accent. Such a shame. So, if you are a reader who doesn’t know any better it probably won’t make any difference, but beware if you are Italian or have learned Italian well.

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