How long does it take to read My Real Children?
My Real Children by Jo Walton takes about 6 hours 18 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 18 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2001. 344 pages, about 94,600 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 31 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 18 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 57 minutes |
The page count is the median across 15 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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?
Subjects: Memory in old age, Women, Identity (Psychology), Uncertainty, Nuclear warfare, Fiction
