Another short story collection. Two of the stories in here are repeats from collections I’ve previously read: “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” (in Warlock at the Wheel) and “The Sage of Theare” (in both that and Mixed Magics). The other five are new, in the sense that I haven’t read them before; I didn’t think to approach these things in publication order.

“The Master” didn’t do a lot for me; it felt a little too weird and disjointed, not drawing together until the end, and even then not enough. That scene gave the story a point, but didn’t do anything to put previous events in context.

“Enna Hittims” got me off on the wrong foot with the way Anne’s parents took care of her — or rather, failed to — when she was seriously ill with the mumps. This might be the neglected-child version of what I’ve started thinking of as the Goon Problem: I don’t mind the titular character in Archer’s Goon being horrible at people, because the novel both fleshes out that situation and waters it down with other narrative material, but I dislike that motif when it shows up in condensed form in DWJ’s short fiction. Anne being left to more or less starve, and then being laughed at by her father for the disfigurement brought on by the mumps, really rubbed me the wrong way, even though some of the kids in the novels suffer far worse. The end was touching, though.

“The Girl Who Loved the Sun” was pretty good, in a tragic and deeply disturbed way.

“What the Cat Told Me” is fun but not memorable; the plot is fairly mundane, lifted up a touch by the narrative voice of the cat.

“Nad and Dan Adn Quaffy” I remember reading before, and it still doesn’t do a lot for me. As with my complaint about the stories in Stopping for a Spell and Warlock at the Wheel, the magic is too random and unexplained, and the running motif with the typos doesn’t amuse me enough. I do like the line about pretending to be the captain of a starship, though.

Heather, a girl whose parents are curators for a “British Trust” (i.e. National Trust) estate, accidentally calls forth a Jacobean-era man known as Wild Robert, who runs around wreaking havoc with magic.

This book is short enough that I suspect in technical terms it’s only a novelette — no more than fifteen thousand words, and probably less. It could easily have been included in one of DWJ’s collections of short fiction, rather than being published independently. But it’s a pleasant enough story; I found it much nicer than the stories compiled in Stopping for a Spell, which were also put out as individual books.

As for spoilers . . . .

(more…)

I said at the end of my last post that I wasn’t sure if I’d ever read Hexwood before. I can say now that I’m 99% I hadn’t — because surely I would have remembered The One Where Diana Wynne Jones Wrote an Episode of Doctor Who.

Seriously, how else am I supposed to describe a book that has dragons, robots, medieval knights, evil galactic overlords, a girl with four not-so-imaginary voices in her head, and a simulation device that might end up assimilating the entire planet Earth? Plus a story that doesn’t quite go according to normal linear chronology. I pity the poor soul who had to write cover copy for this thing. Here’s what my edition has:

Strange things happen at Hexwood Farm. From her window, Ann Staveley watches person after person disappear through the farm’s gate — and never come out again. Later, in the woods nearby, she meets a tormented sorcerer, who seems to have arisen from a centuries-long sleep. But Ann knows she saw him enter the farm just that morning. Meanwhile, time keeps shifting in the woods, where a small boy — or perhaps a teenager — has encountered a robot and a dragon. Long before the end of their adventure, the strangeness of Hexwood has spread from Earth right out to the center of the galaxy.

Me, I would say that the story concerns a device called a Bannus, which was designed to aid in decision-making: given suitable starting parameters, it simulates every possible set of outcomes. It was built by a race of people called the Reigners, five of whom are now basically the aforementioned evil galactic overlords; when a Bannus left on Earth gets out of control, they rush to try and shut it down, but instead the Bannus keeps trapping everything within its simulation.

Does that make any sense? I can’t tell. This book is extremely hard to summarize, and moderately confusing to read, too. I did enjoy it, but you’ve got to be willing to let go of linearity, and be okay with the fact that many of the characters spend most of the book being totally adrift as to who anybody is and what order they’re encountering each other in.

Maybe spoilers will help. Then again, maybe not.

The hidden leaders of magical society on Earth discover that a neighboring universe is using our world as an experimental laboratory: siccing problems (like global warming) on us with the intent of seeing how we cope with them. They mount an expedition to put an end to the problem.

My recollection is that when I was a kid, most of Diana Wynne Jones’ work was shelved in the children’s department; this book, however, was in the nascent Young Adult section. It’s certainly aimed at an older readership. The only work of Jones’ I can think of that’s comparable is Deep Secret, a later (and more successful) book. This one doesn’t seem to be anybody’s favorite — though I could be wrong — and a great many people don’t like it at all. So bear that in mind when you decide whether to read the spoilers that follow.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Like Witch’s Business/Wilkin’s Tooth, I’m not sure why this book got retitled. My guess is they wanted something that might at least vaguely signal fantasy, as Aunt Maria could be any kind of book at all, but it doesn’t work very well; the book makes only one use of the phrase, in the first paragraph of the book (comparing their family situation to the card game Hearts, aka Black Maria), and to a U.S. eye it otherwise calls up weird, semi-racial connotations. Or at least it does for me, because fantasy so often uses “black” to signal “evil.”

Anyway, the book. It falls into the “somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long” sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, but as I’ve said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it’s still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I’m qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)

The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting — read, waiting hand and foot on — Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris’s recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn’t nice at all.

Spoilers!

Another slight entry. (I almost combined it with the post on Yes, Dear, but decided to keep all the books in separate posts, for the sake of organization.)

This is a straight-up retelling of the “Puss in Boots” tale, with no particular alteration that I could spot. My copy, which I think was produced for World Book Day, has some nice running illustrated borders at the top and bottom, and small images of the characters scattered throughout. It’s moderately attractive, and so if you want to own a copy of this story, and prefer Diana Wynne Jones’ style to Perrault’s (which, really, why wouldn’t you), then it’s worth having.

Not much to say about this one. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only straight-up picture book Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote. That being a genre I’m almost completely ignorant of, I’m more or less completely unqualified to judge whether this one’s any good.

The story, such as it is, concerns a girl who finds a magic leaf, but nobody in her family will believe her about it. The artwork is pleasing enough. If you have a small person in your acquaintance and you want to get them started on DWJ as early as possible, you might have use for this book; otherwise, it’s far too slight to really be appreciated in the same way as her other work.

Last of the Chrestomanci books.

Marianne Pinhoe comes from one of several “dwimmer” families, who practice a kind of magic that they keep hidden from Chrestomanci and his establishment. Doing that gets harder, though, when Gammer — the old woman who rules the Pinhoes — loses her wits, and a war ensues between the Pinhoes and the neighboring Farleighs. Marianne also gives Cat Chant a strange egg from Gammer’s attic, which leads to further trouble.

I quite like this one, though not to the degree that I like the ones I read as a kid. It’s . . . pleasantly comfortable, if that makes sense. I enjoy seeing Cat now that he’s found his feet, and Marianne is fun, too, especially since she’s got the “large, boisterous family” thing going on that we saw in The Magicians of Caprona.

As for the spoilers . . . .

(more…)

Like Sophie, I am remorseless, but my remorselessness lacks method: I failed to actually determine whether there was a particular subset of the short story collections I could obtain so as to cover all the short stories, with a minimum of duplication. As a result, I’ve already read two of the four stories here in Warlock at the Wheel, and technically I also read “Stealer of Souls” on its own, since I ordered the World Book Day edition of that before I realized it was in (and subsequently ordered) Mixed Magics.

Anyway. “Warlock at the Wheel” and “The Sage of Theare” I’ve reported on. As for the other two stories:

“Stealer of Souls” pleased me all out of proportion by answering the morbid question that’s been lurking in the back of my head for years: what happened to Gabriel de Witt? If he still had eight lives left when Christopher was a boy, then it must have taken a heck of a lot of dying to get rid of him between then and Christopher’s tenure as Chrestomanci. Turns out it’s more or less like I thought, to whit, once you get old enough your lives just start slipping away via the same natural causes that everybody else suffers from. You don’t get extended life or anything, just more chances to bounce back. And it makes sense to me that, being as old as he was, and passing in that fashion, he would abdicate and let Christopher take over. (So for a little while there, they had three nine-lifed enchanters around. Man, knowing that we’ll never get any more of these books has apparently stuck my brain in fanfic gear, because now I want a story about the one time Gabriel, Christopher, and Cat had to team up to lay a smackdown on something.)

Oh, you want me to talk about the actual story? I liked it, though I kept being irresistibly distracted by the fact that the guy was calling himself Neville Spiderman. It was good to see some follow-through with Tonino, and the whole thing with the souls was suitably creepy. Not the most memorable, but not bad, either.

“Carol Oneir’s Hundredth Dream” scratched the “so what happened with Oneir, anyway?” itch, though only tangentially. I liked it for its commentary on storytelling and creativity, and also for watching Christopher be a politely sarcastic bastard (which pretty much never gets old for me). I think I wanted it to be longer, so it would have more space to develop things, but what we got was pleasant enough.

In Verona Caprona, the families of the Montagues Montanas and Capulets Petrocchis have been feuding since, well, forever. To make matters worse, although they’re the most powerful spell-making families in Caprona, the virtue seems to be going out of their work; their spells are failing, right when an alliance of Florence, Pisa, and Siena is threatening Caprona’s borders. As with Romeo and Juliet, it’s up to the kids to bridge the rift their parents won’t cross — though in this case it involves less death, more Punch and Judy shows.

This book takes place in the same world as The Lives of Christopher Chant and Charmed Life (the same specific world — Twelve-A), but is more like Witch Week or Conrad’s Fate in that it uses Chrestomanci for a side character. This one is generally happier than either of those; among other things, it goes the opposite direction from the usual pattern of neglected or abused children, and puts our characters into huge, boisterous, occasionally contentious but entirely loving families. I especially love the way that fantasy gets integrated into the family dynamic in an understated way: aunts and cousins popping out of the woodwork to help or interfere with things isn’t a coincidence, it’s a function of the magic that underlies them all.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to the spoilers we go.

(more…)

The back cover of my copy of Witch Week calls it “a wild comic fantasy from a master of the supernatural.”

Um.

There are certainly funny bits in this book. (The mop-and-hoe incident comes to mind.) But “wild comic fantasy”? On a micro scale, Larwood House manages to hit almost every abusive-boarding-school trope there is: never warm enough, dreary food, teachers ranging from neglectful to cruel, and all the student-level nastiness you would expect. On a macro scale, the world is one where witches are still burned at the stake, and since half the students at Larwood are witch-orphans, that means half the characters live in fear of the inquisitors coming after them. You know how I’ve been talking about the way Diana Wynne Jones’ books contain these hard edges, but buried in a way that lets you deal with them on your own terms? The hard edges here are scarcely buried at all. I think Witch Week is a very good book, but I almost never re-read it, because I can’t lose sight of how grim it is.

Which is not to say it’s unrelentingly bleak; it isn’t. (I don’t want to scare off anybody who hasn’t read it already.) But you may spend a goodly chunk of the time outraged, before the narrative gets to the point where it says “you know how this world is really messed-up and wrong? Yeah. That isn’t an accident; it’s the real conflict underlying everything else.”

Onward to the spoilers.

(more…)

The people up at Stallery Manor keep “pulling the probabilities” — manipulating chance to change the world into one that’s more favorable to them. The problem is, this causes all kinds of spillover changes, most of which go unnoticed by people elsewhere in the world (things have always been that way, right?), but which are readily apparent to people living in the town of Stallchester. Conrad, a boy of twelve, gets sent up there to become a servant and sniff around for the cause of these problems . . . and also to kill somebody. You see, Conrad has an evil fate: some kind of bad karma hanging around from a past life, when he failed to take out somebody he was supposed to. If he doesn’t make good on that now, he’ll die before the year is out.

And then things get more complicated when an older boy named Christopher shows up, from another world, looking for his missing friend Millie.

Yes, this is another Chrestomanci book (and I think the only other story that shows us Christopher in his pre-Chrestomanci days). I bore it a bit of a grudge the first time I read it because I wanted MOAR CHRISTOPHER DANGIT, and that isn’t this book; I liked it better now that I was reading the book it actually was. Really, what it is could be described as “the Chrestomanci series meets Gosford Park / Downton Abbey;” a lot of the story revolves around the servants-eye view of a grand household, first as vast amounts of effort are spent on keeping three people in style, then as a bunch of guests show up.

The rest of the details go behind the cut.

(more…)

Since I got a request for Witch Week, I postponed the Dalemark books in favor of doing the Chrestomanci ones instead. But never fear, I’ll get to them all. 🙂

After Eric Chant (nicknamed Cat) and his older sister Gwendolen are orphaned in a steamboat accident, Gwendolen, who is a powerful witch, schemes to have them taken in by Chrestomanci as his wards. But Chrestomanci refuses to let Gwendolen go on learning magic — Cat, for his own part, doesn’t seem to have any — and so she begins causing trouble, and plotting with some rather unsavory magical types to boot. When Gwendolen pulls off her most spectacular trick, Cat finds himself saddled with the resulting mess.

This is actually the first Chrestomanci book, though it’s third chronologically, and decidedly not the first one I read. (That was Lives, and then maybe one or both of Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona; I can’t remember precisely.) I never quite read it with the right eye, though, since I came to it as a Christopher fangirl, and accordingly process Chrestomanci through a lens that didn’t actually exist when the story was written. Also, many of the things going on in the story were from the start entirely obvious to me, since I already knew the setting.

Despite me having that odd perspective on it, this is a delightful book. It has all the hallmarks of DWJ’s writing, from the whimsy to the interesting world to the deft handling of some really, really unpleasant elements. But saying more involves spoilers, so behind the cut we go.

(more…)