I’ve been hearing about Jo Walton for a while, but the place I chose to start was an odd one. Regular readers of the blog will be unsurprised to hear that it had a lot to do with Bingo. I’ve been working on a “Not So Hard” theme where I fill each square with a book that fits the square but does not fit the optional “hard mode.” Nowhere is that more difficult than Small Town, where hard mode is the relatively easy “set in a small town located in the real world (even if the town is fictional).” So I’ve been on the hunt for secondary world small towns, and a friend recommended a Jo Walton limited release: Lifelode. 

Lifelode takes place in a world where time and magic behave differently based on geography. The gods live in the East, where magic is plentiful and time passes slowly. They say that in the West, where time passes more quickly, there is no magic at all and not even any human spirit, with the land populated only by fleshly automatons. The main story, however, takes place roughly in the middle, in the household of the ruling family of a small town. The family consists of four adults in a polyamorous relationship and a handful of children, all with their own small magics. But when a distant ancestor returns from communing with the gods in the East and a young scholar from the West arrives to study a land he perceives as full of magic, it sets off a family drama driven by meddling gods using their priests to sow discord in an attempt recover something they had lost. 

There are many arguments for and against providing books with numerical ratings—obviously, I come down in favor, seeing as how I rate everything from 1 to 20—but one downside in particular is that it flattens the distinctions between books that I may enjoy about the same but for wildly different reasons. I often give four stars to books that are solidly enjoyable but don’t have the ambition or vivacity to become true favorites. Lifelode is not that. It has ambition in spades and is littered with fascinating plotlines and storytelling techniques. It needed a little bit more time spent resolving all of them, and so it will still fall in my four star range, but this is a book well worth reading for the things it tries, even if they don’t all land. 

The one that immediately jumps out at the reader is the use of tense. Lifelode is framed as a group of family members trying to remember and record events that had taken place several decades before. As such, they’re often unclear about the exact sequencing of events. Moreover, one of the novel’s central characters—the lover of the town’s Lord, whose life calling (the titular “lifelode”) is keeping the house—has the ability to see glimpses of people in the past and future and as such has an unusual relationship with time. This comes out practically in a story that’s told almost entirely in present tense, even when recalling events separated by months or years. It takes some adjustment on the part of the reader to stop trying to parse out an exact timeline and let themself sink into the flow of the narrative, but it doesn’t take long before this starts to feel like a natural part of the storytelling, one that fits wonderfully with both the frame story and the central character. 

But the whole plot and character focus also feels unusual for the genre—perhaps moderately less so in the current boom of low-stakes fantasy—in a way that allows it to dig into some fascinating and often underdeveloped aspects of a world of magic. This is certainly not a single-POV book, but the character that feels most central is a middle-aged mother with a lifelode of managing the home. She cooks, she cleans, she sews, and she finds fulfillment in using her skills to better the lives of her family. 

Unfortunately, she feels that the rest of the family can tend to take this work for granted, especially when the other woman in the polycule (also a middle-aged mother) is young and beautiful and attracts lovers seemingly without a thought. And so when that young and handsome scholar comes to visit, his attentions can either validate her fears or show her something new. 

In the rare times that fantasy centers a homemaking woman, it’s usually to push back against the gendered expectations that foist that work exclusively on women. But Lifelode is doing something different, not making a point about women’s or men’s work per se, but rather about the perception of such vital tasks that so often go unappreciated, playing out here via a love triangle featuring a pair of women in open marriages with each other’s lovers.

It’s an ambitious story precisely because of how grounded it feels, and my favorite parts of Lifelode are the ones that lean into that very personal, very real family drama. If that were the focus of the entire book, it may have been a five-star read for me. But I promised meddling gods, and the family drama is only one piece (if admittedly the most interesting one) of a goddess’ attempt to recover an acolyte who’d abandoned her. Those attempts also include religious pressure and even direct combat, and while they may be isolated to the small town in which the story is set, they do nudge the story into the higher stakes more common in traditional fantasy stories. 

They also lead to a whole lot of plot threads at play for such a short novel, and the biggest weakness of Lifelode is simply not taking time to do justice to each of those elements. The conflicts that are so painstakingly set up are resolved quickly, and moments that should deliver enormous emotional impact don’t linger in the way they should. Even the family drama that I find so compelling moves just a tick too quickly at the end, leaving me with a feeling of wanting more. 

Overall, Lifelode is a novel that’s ambitious both stylistically and in how it tells a story so unusual within the genre. It’s all set up with such skill as to make it well worth the read for those interested in stylistic experiments or in the themes the novel explores. But the payoff is a little too quick and too cluttered, and while it’s satisfying enough to leave the reader with a sense of closure, it doesn’t hit the heights of promise of what had come before. But even if not everything lands perfectly, I’m still very glad I gave this book a read. 

Recommended if you like: family dramas, stories about characters rarely centered in fantasy, creative narration styles. 

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Set in a Small Town, features Dreams, and features a Character with a Disability. 

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.