My Real Children is a 2014 alternate history novel by Welsh-Canadian writer Jo Walton, published by Tor Books. It was released on May 20, 2014.
Plot
In 2015, Patricia is 89 years old and living in a nursing home, with two mutually-exclusive sets of memories: one of a world where John F. Kennedy was killed by a bomb in 1963, and one of a world where Kennedy chose not to run in 1964 after an escalated Cuban Missile Crisis led to the nuclear obliteration of Miami and Kyiv—and, on a more personal level, one in which she went by "Trish", married a man and had four children before she was able to escape an unhappy marriage and become involved in politics, and one in which, as "Pat", she was a successful travel writer raising three children with her lesbian partner. Both feel completely real, but both cannot be – even though both sets of children visit her.
Patricia's two worlds
In the
nuclear weapons
during wartime.
Reception
Man in the High Castle,[1] while Robert Wiersema described it as having "achingly beautiful prose and carefully crafted characters".[2]Cory Doctorow said that it was a "standout" even when compared to Walton's other works, and that it "literally kept [him] up all night, weeping uncontrollably with the most astounding mixture of joy and sorrow",[3] while at NPR, Amal El-Mohtar said that to call the book "elegant" was not enough.[4]
