Caspar, Johnny, and Gwinny are none too happy with their mother having remarried, to a man they think of as the Ogre. The Ogre’s sons, Douglas and Malcolm, aren’t very happy with it either. Then the Ogre buys Johnny and Malcolm chemistry sets, and wacky hijinks ensue when some of the chemicals turn out to be magic.

This, like Witch’s Business (aka Wilkins’ Tooth), is in the camp of “books I read once and never went back to.” It’s not hard to see why. This isn’t a bad novel; it may bear a strong resemblance to the stories in Stopping for a Spell, but it’s far better than any of those, probably because it’s longer and therefore has more time to develop its ideas. But there’s no deeper, more fantastical layer — not even the hint of one you get in Witch’s Business. The chemicals that drive the plot never get explained, and their source vanishes at the end of the book, without ever having made more than a cameo appearance in the tale. So basically, this feels more like standard-issue children’s fantasy, less like Diana Wynne Jones.

There are a few characteristic touches, though, discussion of which I’ll put behind the cut.

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Originally published as Wilkins’ Tooth. I don’t know why the title got changed, unless it was because some marketing person thought the original might be mistaken for a mundane story about Wilkins going to the dentist.

This was Diana Wynne Jones’ first fantasy novel for children (her second novel at all, after Changeover, which I can’t find for less than eighty dollars and may never end up reading.) In it, a pair of children whose pocket-money has been stopped set up a revenge business — Own Back, Ltd. — but run into trouble when the local crackpot turns out to be a witch who feels they’re intruding on her territory.

The premise feels pretty standard for a children’s book, whether fantastical or otherwise — much moreso than her later novels do. The protagonists sort of hope somebody will hire them to get revenge on the local bully, but instead the bully hires/blackmails them to get revenge on his behalf. Their efforts to carry out the job lead to more trouble, things snowball, the kids hit a point where they owe too much to too many people, etc. It’s pleasant reading, but not memorable; I’m not surprised that I’ve never gone back to re-read this one.

The one almost-memorable part has to do with the witch and the Adams family (not to be confused with the Addams family). Another author might have stayed with the simple plot of escalating problems, but DWJ hints at a deeper layer that created many of those problems in the first place. Unfortunately, she only hints: we never get much detail about why the Adamses were cursed, etc. I wish there had been more of that, to underpin the fun with something a little more substantial. But I’ll have more thoughts about that when I report back on The Ogre Downstairs.

Tackled this one at the request of marumae. (Or rather, moved it up in the queue at her request.)

Quick synopsis: Sirius is a luminary, a member of a godlike race of entities that inhabit and personify the stars of the universe. At the beginning of the book, he’s put on trial for having killed another luminary using a Zoi, which is an object of great power. But instead of being executed for his crime, he’s exiled to Earth, in the body of a dog. If he can find and recover the Zoi before the dog’s natural lifespan ends, he can return home.

It is, as marumae said, a very bittersweet book. Sirius, born as a helpless puppy, takes a while to understand what’s going on around him, but we the readers can see the unpleasantness of it from the start. There are a lot of of awful people in this book (as well as some very good ones), and the worst part is that they’re completely plausible in their awfulness: not mustache-twirling villains, but people with ordinary cruelty and lack of compassion. And then there’s a second, subtler kind of unpleasantness, which is the inhuman nature of luminaries; they aren’t necessarily bad, but even at their best they don’t have human considerations.

The interesting thing for me, reading this book, is that I now have the perspective to see how this feels like a Diana Wynne Jones who hasn’t fully hit her stride. (Dogsbody was published in 1975; it was her fifth book, and fourth work of fantasy.) All her usual touches are here: finely observed detail, souls both generous and stingy, abused children, numinous wonder breaking through into the ordinary, and more. But there’s a lot at the end, after Sirius and the others follow the cold hounds, that is fabulous in concept but (for me) not quite there in execution. Explaining why involves spoilers, so stay outside the cut if you want to avoid the next two paragraphs.

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I decided to spread the short-fiction collections out between novels, and tackled this one first.

All three of the stories contained in it were originally published independently; Fantastic Fiction lists Chair Person and Four Grannies as novels, and Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? as a picture book. All three come with illustrations in this collection, though, and they’re all about the same length, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the first two were picture books, too.

I know I’ve read some, maybe all, of her shorter work before, but I can’t say any of it ever really made an impression on me. Coming at it now, I have to say the impression made by these three stories isn’t very good. The magic in all three is thoroughly arbitrary, working for no particular reason and then stopping when it’s no longer needed. “Chair Person” and “Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?” also share a structure I don’t like very much, namely: “Horrible person moves in and is thoroughly abusive to a family; parents are too polite to get rid of him no matter how bad his actions are; the kids eventually solve the problem with magic.” It’s like the Goon from Archer’s Goon, but without a broader story to dilute the nastiness, and both the Chair Person and Angus Flint are far, far more unpleasant than he is. And I can’t say I was terribly fond of Erg in “Four Grannies,” either, for all that he was nominally the protagonist.

So yeah, not the best. I’ll be interested to see how the rest of her short fiction compares; some people just have a knack for one length over another, and I suspect that may be the case here. So if you’re looking for Diana Wynne Jones books to try out, this is not a good place to start. Aside from the occasional bit of clever description — one of her trademarks, after all — these stories really don’t showcase her strengths.

We’re almost at the end of the Diana Wynne Jones books I wrote recommendations for; this is the last but one. (The final title is Eight Days of Luke, which is also a favorite, but it’s sort of a first-and-a-halfth tier favorite, along with Archer’s Goon and The Power of Three and maybe some others, too.)

So that link has the plot summary and so on. Here, outside the spoiler cut, I’ll say that the only DWJ novel that has ever seemed to me at all similar to this one (and vice versa) is Fire and Hemlock, though I’ve heard people talk about a few others in a way that makes me think I may change that evaluation, once I remind myself of what those others are like. Partly it’s the role of real-world folklore — though in this case the components are easy to spot, since many of them are named in the opening paragraph. The Wandering Jew. The Flying Dutchman (whose ship is on the cover of my edition). Him, whom I won’t name here because this is the non-spoiler part of the discussion, but those of you who have read the book know who I’m talking about. Then again, there may well be other layers that aren’t so obvious to spot.

But really, what makes this one feel akin to Fire and Hemlock is the way it sort of slantwise approaches some really thorny things before turning to look at them directly, without flinching. Neither of these books is precisely happy. They both end on a note of hope, but it’s tempered with some real sorrow, the victory coming at a fair bit of cost. I’m really sort of startled this counts as a kids’ book, even if the protagonist is twelve. But kids need stories of this kind too, I suppose — even if it leaves me, at the age of thirty, feeling like somebody has stomped on my heart.

I think that’s all I can say that’s non-spoilery. Follow me behind the cut for the rest.

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When I started these posts, I had to decide on an icon. I can no longer remember what cover was on the copy of The Lives of Christopher Chant I read back in the day, and sadly, my memory of my original Fire and Hemlock cover turned out to be way cooler than the reality. (In my head, it looked a lot more like the photograph is described. I would pay so much money to see Diana’s actual Fire and Hemlock picture.)

But I remember the cover under which I first read Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s the one you see in this icon, and while Howl himself doesn’t look right, that is Calcifer. (One of the many reasons I was disappointed with Miyazaki’s film is that Calcifer, while adorable, was utterly wrong.) So, since I wanted an icon that might actually be recognized as Diana Wynne Jones-related, this was the natural choice.

Since I’ve started to begin this project by re-reading my first tier of favorites — I don’t have a favorite, one that stands out above all others — I will once again point you at the recommendation I wrote some time ago, which gives you a sense of the plot. This one is much more fairy-tale-ish in its flavor, firmly set by the opening paragraph’s proclamations about the misfortune of being born the eldest of three. Its hard edges aren’t as prominent, either, as in the previous two books; there are some unpleasant notion lurking in the whole business with the fire demons, and also in what happens with Mrs. Pentstemmon (not to mention Prince Justin and the Wizard Suliman), but there’s less that makes you squirm and think, um, these people aren’t entirely good, are they? Howl’s faults, while real, are also less sharp-edged.

But it’s a Diana Wynne Jones book, and that means it also has some interesting truths about people’s behavior. I saw somebody’s post talking about how Christopher gets smacked upside the head by Flavian’s outburst in Lives, and so, in a way, does the reader; there’s a similar kind of reversal here with Fanny, as Sophie’s mental image of her (and the reader’s) changes from the beginning to the end of the book. Sophie’s own motivations are for a time unclear to her, and Howl . . . well, let’s just say that I’m wondering if my childhood fondness for this book somehow primed me to like Francis Crawford of Lymond. There are some unexpected similarities between the two.

I’m wandering close to spoiler territory, though, so I’ll put the rest behind the cut.

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