troisoiseaux | Entries tagged with diana wynne jones

Read I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, which starts with a musician on a probably futile quest to reunite with his dead wife on a possibly supernatural archipelago in Lake Superior – it's not a retelling of Orpheus & Eurydice, but it's got the family nose, as it were; the blurb describes the main character, Rainy, as "an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator" – and then wanders off to become a different story entirely halfway through. I keep wanting to describe this as "gently dystopian," which is slightly misleading; the dystopian aspects of its near-future setting are certainly not gentle, but it's a world of communities doing their best to keep going post-collapse of society as we know it as much as it is one of indentured servitude and the powerful squashing the weak, on however petty a scale that power comes. Would pair well with Catherine Leroux's The Future, I think.

Read The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, which was a fascinating book in ways I don't want to spoil for anyone who hasn't read it: ( ... )

Current Music: Into the Storm - Marianas Trench

Read Unexpected Magic, a collection of short stories (and one novella) by Diana Wynne Jones. Enjoyed this! Delightful mix of stories, but a few overarching themes emerged: fictional creations coming to life (2), stories from the POV of a wizard's cat (2, subtly interconnected), and trios of sisters/families clearly inspired by if not (as in "The Girl Jones") actually fictionalized versions of Diana's own (also 2). I was surprised by the stories with more sci-fi elements: in "Nad and Dan adn Quaffy", a sci-fi author is contacted from another dimension of her own invention; "No One" has a robot POV/main character and can be best described as "Home Alone set in a smart house as imagined in the 1980s" (although, as such, predates Home Alone). Overall, my favorite story was probably "The Girl Who Loved the Sun", which isn't a retelling of a specific myth but feels like one; it's going to stick with me for a while.

Started Bleak House by Charles Dickens; I'm only a few chapters in, but this has already presented quite the data point for my "Dickensian father figures are a mixed bag but mothers are always HOO BOY" theory in Mrs. Jellyby, and I'm charmed by how effusive Esther is about her new best friend Ada.

Read Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, which was fun, but completely not the story that I was expecting it to be?? For one thing, I had somehow gotten the impression that it was a Magical Boarding School story, rather than a Magical Country House Foster Home story. I was also surprised - but delighted! - by the ( midpoint twist. )

Re-read The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, which was one of my childhood favorites - a middle-grade spy novel full of wordplay and puzzles, about a team of clever, lonely kids who are recruited for an undercover mission at a nefarious boarding school - and, honestly, holds up really well to revisiting it as an adult. Reading this as a kid, I don't think I noticed or appreciated the way it's about how different types of intelligence are all equally valid and important— of the kids that make up the spy team, one is good at puzzles and patterns and has the most emotional intelligence; one is a bookworm with an eidetic memory; one isn't as big on book learnin' but has a talent for gadgets and thinking outside of the box. ( ... ) The lesson that has lived rent-free in my head for years is that you should always read test questions very, very carefully.

Also read Stewart's latest installment, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Mystery of Ages— published in 2019 after a ten-year gap, I got the sense that Stewart wrote it with both actual middle-grade readers and the now-young adults who grew up on the original books in mind, and I feel like he strikes the balance well. That is: it's definitely a middle-grade novel, but on a thematic level, the characters are on the cusp of Growing Up and torn between being excited for new opportunities and not wanting things to change, which would certainly resonate with the type of young adult who revisits a beloved children's series out of nostalgia, and on a practical one, both the main characters' nostalgia and Stewart's introduction of a new character allows for some fairly organic recapping of the previous books for, say, someone who hasn't read the series since 2009.

Read The Future by Catherine Leroux, set in a dystopian future(?) Detroit with an alternate-history past – in this world, it's the francophone Canadian city of Fort Détroit – and also magic?? (It took me until almost the end of the book to pin down whether the magic was actually happening or more metaphorical magical realism, but I came down on the side of there being actual magic.) All of which is just the backdrop! Plot-wise, it's about a woman searching for her missing granddaughters after their mother/her daughter is murdered, which brings her into the orbit of two communities: a ramshackle society of lost children living in Fort Détroit's Parc Rouge, and a neighborhood bound by shared history and a shared garden. It's a kaleidoscopic story, with a wide-reaching narrative built from vignettes, each tightly focused on one or two individual characters; and it's a story that loops around on itself, revisiting the same scenes from different perspectives. My interest in this had originally been piqued by Leroux's alt-history Detroit, but I ended up really liking it for the ways it felt like a take on Peter Pan.

Read Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones, which was an ABSOLUTE DELIGHT, 10/10. If you've ever read Howl's Moving Castle and been like "I wish DWJ had written a prequel about how a Welsh grad student ends up as a wizard in another world," this is not exactly that book, but it satisfies the same itch: a stressed-out multiverse wizard in his mid-20s tries to keep a space empire from collapsing while also looking for a new multiverse wizard apprentice at a sci-fi/fantasy convention in England, and he is so annoyed about the bossy weird young woman who is obviously his best choice. I loved this!! It has so many great characters, and does fun things with blending magic and (1990s) technology, and made me nostalgic for a convention experience I've never actually had. It definitely felt written for a more mature audience than most of DWJ's books, both in a "jokes about erotic art and orgies" way and a "higher stakes, more serious consequences" way...? Very '90s in some ways that have not aged super well, but didn't rankle.

I've read through 3.8 in Les Mis— I'm over halfway through! Marius has fallen in love with Cosette from afar and is being a total doofus about it; Hugo has introduced Éponine (tragic darling of my heart) and narrative coincidence has thrown together four people who had more or less given up on trying to actively track down or avoid at least one of the others.

Read Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones: a family of traveling musicians ends up on the wrong side of a despotic earl when they take on a mysterious young passenger. I picked this up after (and really, because of) learning about an absolutely bonkers plot point, which impacted my view of certain characters from the beginning, but overall, it was quite good— I was reminded of The Dark Lord of Derkholm, especially in its child's-eye view of a grim political situation, although it was set in a different sort of secondary fantasy world.

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Read two novellas by Sarah Tolmie: All the Horses of Iceland and The Fourth Island. Both are historical fantasy— in the 9th century, a Norse trader in Central Asia encounters a ghost; in the mid-19th, the residents of one of the Aran Islands cross paths with another, secret island that exists outside of time— and less than 70 pages and absolutely brilliant; now I understand the concept of Short Perfect Novels as discussed in Louise Erdrich's Sentence, although I suppose these are more properly Tiny Perfect Novellas. As well as the supernatural, language/translation is a theme in both stories.

Re-read Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and, with Northanger Abbey still fresh in my mind, I was struck for the first time by similarities between the two: the opening passages of both books are a tongue-in-cheek wink at the cliches of a particular genre (Gothic novels, fairy tales); both Catherine and Sophie go nosing into someone else's business with the expectation of finding something terrible (murder! a wizard's hoard of stolen hearts!) and find the explanation is actually mundane (a tragic but normal loss; the country of Wales). Of course, the different genres and the protagonists' different personalities— Catherine is a 100% genuine ingenue; Sophie thinks she is self-aware and genre-savvy but really she's just built herself emotional armor out of fairy-tale cliches— means that the basic similarity of "protagonist thinks she knows what's going on; she does not" plays out in very different ways, but like, here are two dots, I've connected them.

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- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a retelling of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield in modern-day Appalachia. It's a solid novel in its own right— a bildungsroman set against the backdrop of America's opioid crisis— but being able to recognize the bones of David Copperfield underneath the new upholstery is what really made it one of the best books I've read this year. It hews remarkably close to the original without feeling like it was forcing the narrative, making Kingsolver's point— about how the problems of "institutional poverty and its damages to children in [Dickens'] society ... have yet to be solved in ours"— even stronger.

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- Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones (re-read). I had very mixed feelings when I read it for the first time a couple of years ago; I think I appreciated it more, this time, but it is just such an odd duck of a book that I honestly can't decide whether I liked it more. I liked a lot of the underlying concepts— young Polly's stories coming to life; adolescent Polly realizing her memories of her childhood adventures have been written over with false, mundane ones; Here Now and Nowhere— but there's just something so.... unsettling.... about it as a reading experience. Which is a feature, not a bug, but definitely why I feel like drawing a line between appreciate and like. I think this analysis of the ending is quite good.

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Finished South Riding by Winifred Holtby, which— oh my god. Oh my god!!!! I was not expecting the plot to go where it did?! I read the last several chapters in one sitting, finished it just after midnight, and then spent at least another hour staring at the ceiling contemplating, like, the meaning of life and how We Live In A Society. (I've spent the past week listening to The Trials of Cato's 2018 album Hide and Hair on repeat for unrelated reasons, but their song "These Are the Things" has become tangled up with this book in my head: when you live by the day at the market's command / where profit and property's the law of the land / to be held, to be heard, to be dealt a fair hand / these are the things that our people demand.)

Finished The Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr! Re-reading my original review from two years (?!) ago, I had noted that Karr's interest really lies with the, if not outright villainous, at least maligned characters of Arthuriana - Mordred, Morgan(a), churlish Kay - but this time, I was struck by the overlap between that narrative goal and how much of a voice (and depth, and sympathy) she gives to the women of Arthurian myth— although not, notably, Guenevere herself? (Karr apparently has another book, The Gallows in the Greenwood, that does something similar: a retelling of Robin Hood with a female sheriff of Nottingham.)

( Some thoughts )

Anyway, go read

osprey_archer's review!

Read House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones, a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle— Sophie and (an amusingly disguised) Howl and Calcifer are in it, but the focus of the story is Charmain Baker, a rather spoiled young bookworm tasked with looking after her wizard great-uncle's house - which is Bigger On The Inside - at the same time she's granted her dream of volunteering in the king's royal library. In some ways, there are shades of Howl and Sophie in the interactions between Charmain and Peter, her uncle's apprentice, with various aspects of their personalities and circumstances swapped— Peter is the one cleaning the house with a fury and scolding Charmain for her tendency to slither out of things, although Charmain has Sophie's ability to yell inanimate objects into doing what she wants. There's a dog! 10/10, an absolutely delightful book.

Diana Wynne Jones really did love playing with the "person from our world stumbles into a magical fantasyland" trope, didn't she? Unfortunately for Fantasyland, the stumble-r into this particular world is neither the typical good-hearted schoolchild nor an overdramatic Welsh grad student attempting to run from his responsibilities, but a greedy businessman who immediately sets about wringing every cent of profit he can make out of it, in ways that, throughout the book, are revealed to be increasingly monstrous but only too believable.

His first and foremost scheme is to offer guided tours that, despite relying on complete artifice and the increasingly grudging - eventually, forced - assistance of the locals to tick all the fantasy adventure cliches, leave all-too-real devastation in their wake. After 40 years of this, the people of fantasyland are sick of it, and a plan is put in motion to stop the tours once and for all. Step one of this plan is to elect the most incompetent wizard possible to be this year's Dark Lord, in charge of all the "backstage" organization of the tours, in the hopes of throwing such a wrench in the system it breaks the machine completely. Step one, however, did not take into account that the aforementioned incompetent wizard, Derk, has a small army of kids (two human, five griffins— it's a long story) willing to step up and help run the show, so Mr. Chesney doesn't blame their dad for the tours' failures. Shenanigans commence.

As with many of DWJ's books, I feel like I would have thoroughly enjoyed this one had I read it when I was younger, i.e. the actual target audience, but I don't think I would have fully appreciated the classic fantasy tropes she plays with or the real-world parallels of Mr. Chesney's exploitation, of people and resources alike. It has a ton of moving parts, for such a relatively short book, but they're all balanced so well. I loved Derk's family's dynamics, and the way that the full extent of Mr. Chesney's greed is revealed through the perspective of Derk's son, Blade, through casual asides about how X is just the way things are, and as he learns more about how deeply unfair the system Chesney created is— it's a child's-eye view of capitalist destruction, and utterly chilling. At the same time - because, again, it is by Diana Wynne Jones - it's deeply optimistic about the ability for cycles of exploitation and violence to be broken.

I think, had I read this as a kid, Blade would have been my favorite, but my sympathies in that particular sibling rivalry was with his bossy older sister (the human one) Shona. I also really enjoyed Querida, in all her moral complexities.

I do have a couple of nits to pick, namely:

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Current Music: Clemency for the Wizard King - The Mountain Goats

Recently read

I somehow didn’t get around to reading Howl’s Moving Castle until I was 20, but I’ve re-read it literally every year since then. It’s so good! It’s incredibly funny and well-crafted and has so much heart. Something that hit me this time around was that DWJ does a very good job of writing physical humor – Howl pulling the massively oversized suit into the room after him hand-over-hand; the whole scene with him drunkstumbling back into the castle after his night out – which feels like it must be hard to do.

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I also read The Lady and Sada San by Frances Little, the sequel to The Lady of the Decoration, which I read a few months back. I enjoyed the lush, gorgeous descriptions of the unnamed protagonist’s travels through Japan and China, and the fact that a book from 1912 (!!) features a biracial/Asian character who grew up in Nebraska, because suck it, people complaining about ~forced diversity~ in period films! Unfortunately, her plotline in this centers around returning to Japan after the death of her foster mother and ending up in the clutches of a Nefarious Uncle who owns a tea house with geishas and plans to marry off poor Sada San to the highest bidder. So that’s... a lot. It ends well! But it’s still A Lot.

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Currently reading

Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street; a young Mexican-American girl, Ceyala, spends the summer with her grandparents in Mexico City and begins to unravel the story of her complicated family.