Peter and Max, Bill Willingham

I won Peter and Max from Cecelia of adventures of cecelia bedelia – thank you!  I was having a terrible day, and when I got home I had not one, BUT TWO packages on my doorstep.  One was Peter and Max, and the other was a package of two books and a bookmark from Jeane.  It was amazing.  It caused my day to stop being terrible, and be awesome instead.  (True story.)

If you haven’t read Fables, you should really do that.  In fact, go do that now, and when you have finished, you may come back and we can discuss how we are going to cast the television show they will eventually make of this graphic novel series.  I already have cast most of the parts in my head, but I am not satisfied with some of them, and I am willing to negotiate.  (Don’t you wish the lovely and talented Enver Gjokaj were taller?)

Peter and Max is a prose story, with occasional illustrations by Steve Leialoha, about Peter Piper and his brother, Max, who you pretty quickly figure out is the Pied Piper of Hamelin.  The story goes between the past, exploring Max and Peter’s relationship and Max’s descent into evil, and the present, as Peter tries to find and stop Max.  There are rats and thieves, and (spoiler, sort of!) Bo Peep is an assassin, and the pipes fight, which is cooler than it sounds.

When, about twenty pages in, I flipped back and read the end, and I thought: Well, that’s going to be an anticlimax.  All the build-up to the Final Battle Against Max and it’s not – let’s just say it’s not quite as Gandalf-and-the-Balrog-or-Harry-and-Voldemort-epic as maybe I was expecting from how scared everyone sounded about Max being back in town.  However, when I read through the book, and got to it properly, I found it was not an anticlimax at all.  Action-wise, I was right, it’s anticlimactic; but as far as the emotional journey of the book goes, I think it works just perfectly.

I think if I had to pick one thing about the Fables series that I do not love, it’s how everybody acts tough all the time.  I mean everybody acts tough, every single character, which I guess you are meant to put down to their all having lived so long?  But when I read the dialogue – and it’s more noticeable in a novel than in the comics – the characters all sound a bit the same.  I liked Peter and Max, but the flaws of the comics were present in the novel, and in the novel they jumped out at me more.  I suppose because I didn’t have the pretty drawings to distract me?

Other reviews:

adventures of cecelia bedelia (thanks again!!)
Stainless Steel Droppings
Vasilly
Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
The Written World
with Tales of a Capricious Reader
Largehearted Boy

Tell me if I missed yours!

Update

In case you are wondering:

1. I cried several tears of happiness.
2. I have only a very small, croaky voice left.
3. We will have to think up new hell-froze-over jokes.
4. There is much street-dancing, horn-honking, screaming, and fireworks.

I BELIEVE THIS MEANS THAT LENT IS CANCELED.

I AM HAPPY.

WHO DAT!

My new crush

Brand new mad crush on June Jordan.  How can it be that June Jordan is this great, and yet at the same time I have never heard of her before, and I might never have heard of her at all if I hadn’t been reading random poems on the Poetry Foundation website?  June Jordan!  She was this amazing poet and activist, and I am in love with her!  I don’t really know how to review books of poetry, and I am not through with her memoir, Soldier, to review that either, and I have not yet gotten to the one book of her essays that was not checked out at the library; so I guess I will just go on gushing about her for now.

From Soldier:

What was ugly?  It seemed to mean the wrong family and no friends and other ducks refusing to play with you and making fun of however you didn’t look exactly like them.

And I had never heard about ugly before.  And ugly frightened me.  I was afraid and then I became positive that I might be ugly.

Why did the Ugly Duckling lose its mother?
How could a duck turn into a swan?
Why would that be a happy ending for a duck?
The Ugly Duckling was depicted as a black baby duck.
The swan was white.
How did the black baby duck turn white?
Why was that a happy ending?

I thought I understood that story,
and I didn’t believe it,
and I kept reading it to myself,
over and over.

Here are some poems by June Jordan that I like a lot at the Poetry Foundation website.  And I read loads more in my two books of her poetry, and I really want to read more of her poems but they are checked out.  And I want to read all her essays.  I love her.  I totally love her.  She was all about confronting social injustice.  I love her.  Here are some bits of poems I copied into my commonplace book last night.

From “Lebanon Lebanon”:

As usual
I have to ask
where’s Jesus
when you need him

The miracle of water into wine’s
just fine
but what about
a miracle of blood
delivering a river
we can drink

From “Message to Belfast”:

I am afraid to fall
asleep
but I am proud
to stand before the morning
breaks
awake with no one near
and with my conscience clear
for once
I am completely where
I ought to be

In the city
of Belfast
I have lost and found myself
at home

I am excited to finish her memoir and read her essays and y’all, seriously, she writes beautifully.  I cannot recommend her work highly enough or in glowing enough terms.  I have reviews to catch up on – Peter and Max, Clara Callen, The Icarus Girl – but instead of writing those, I have been falling in love with June Jordan.

Writing swear words in the margins

I was trying to figure out, earlier today, what year it would have been that I started reading to my little sister.  I have read her scads of books over the years, but I’m pretty sure the first one was Half Magic, and I’m pretty sure that after finishing it, we went straight on to Magic by the Lake, which means I must have had them both at the time.  I have definite proof that I got Magic by the Lake for Christmas of 1995.

Let’s say I started reading to Robyn early in 1996.  That was fourteen years ago now.  We read a lot of books together.  I mean we shared a room in our childhood!  It’s not like either of us had to make any big effort to get together and do some reading.  Plus, my family had a big car trip every summer to Maine, which meant three solid days of driving to get there, and three solid days of driving to get back.  That is a lot of time to read.  There are times when we got strapped for books to read next.

I mention this because I wouldn’t have bought Deep Secret if I had had some easy alternative of what to read Robyn instead.  I had decided to read it to her in the time between finally deciding I liked it, and actually buying a copy.  I liked it easily well enough to buy it, but the one they had in the YA section at Bongs & Noodles had a stupid-looking cover:

The back cover blurb is stupid too!  I didn’t want to buy that stupid book.  I was just going to read to Robyn from our oldest sister Anna’s copy, but there were pages missing out of the front of that copy.  So I sighed heavily to make sure Anna knew how severely she was inconveniencing me by having a damaged book; and also to impress upon Robyn the painful and difficult nature of the sacrifices I had to make on her behalf; and I bought the stupid copy of Deep Secret and resigned myself.

(I always wanted Robyn to be pretty clear on how kind I was being to read to her at all.  When I finished a chapter, and was willing to go on and read another chapter, I would start to close the book very slowly while keeping my place with my finger, and I’d say, “And maybe next time—” which was Robyn’s cue to start howling and begging for me to continue.  She’d screech and plead and grovel, and after several minutes of this I’d sigh and say grudgingly, “Well – okay”.  It was sort of control-freaky.  I AM NOT PROUD.)

It turned out that in addition to having a stupid cover and a back-cover blurb made out of fail, this copy of Deep Secret had been censored to make it more kid-friendly.  All the swear words had been changed into less sweary words (except the ones that hadn’t – it was very inconsistent), and anything that would have implied that anyone, anywhere, was thinking about having sex (mind you, this book is set at a fantasy fiction convention) had also been removed.  They left in all the violence though – some pretty violent violence!  It was an idiotic way of doing it.

I didn’t appreciate it.  I so much didn’t appreciate it that I read out of the stupid copy to Robyn with a pen and Anna’s old copy in my other hand, and I checked the versions against each other and made corrections in the margins of the stupid copy.  I did it straight through.  Here is a sample (I chose these pages as an extreme example – in most of the book it’s just a few swear words here and there) (and sorry about the fuzzy edges – I was trying to scan these without cracking the book’s spine):

So reading it was sort of like this:

“I apologized – (Brace yourself, Robyn, there’s a bother coming up, and I suspect not naturally).  One of the six said, Bother – oh, for heaven’s sake!  Bother!  I mean they didn’t mind us seeing that kid get executed at the beginning, or all the business with the sticky drippy blood a little while ago, but they can’t bear the idea that we might read the word Damn in a book marked as appropriate for ages 12 and up.  Robyn, don’t you feel that a majority of kids ages 12 and up know the word Damn already?  There, I’ve fixed it.  One of the six said Damn, and Robyn, let’s be clear, one of the six said damn, damn, damn, and before that they said damn the convention and damn the centaur-”

“I like the centaur,” said Robyn.

“Nobody cares what you like!” I howled.  ”I am on a mission to restore the smut to desmutted books!  And this part says, One of the six said Damn, and everyone is having an orgy in the stairwell, and if they didn’t like the way she wrote the damn book in the first place then they shouldn’t have published it!  This asinine bowdlerization is an insult to the intelligence of every person ages twelve and up!”

Luckily there was a heat wave in London when I was there in 2005, which forced me to spend all my time in the air-conditioned bookshops on Charing Cross Road, and while I was there, I found an undesmutted copy of Deep Secret with, moreover, a rather cool and understated cover that does not embarrass me when I am out in public with it.

So I need never worry about that ridiculous copy again.  I have given it to Robyn, who professes to be madly fond of it.

I have posted this pocket drama of sisterhood and smuttiness rather than reviewing Deep Secret because – well, mostly because I think it is funny.  Also because if you do not believe me by now that Diana Wynne Jones is an amazing writer, indeed that she is just everything that is great about being great, then you never will.  If you do believe me, and just haven’t read Deep Secret, I highly recommend it.  It starts out a bit boring, and you don’t think you’re going to love the characters, but if you push past that, the characters all end up at a fantasy convention and are totally lovable.  WORTH IT.

(The Guardian and Orson Scott Card both rhapsodize rhapsodically about Diana Wynne Jones and her varied ways of being amazing.)

Do you choose your reading material for public places (trains, waiting rooms, classes at university) based on how unembarrassing the covers are?  I’d like to say that I don’t but honesty compels me to admit that it is a consideration.

Reviews of Deep Secret:

Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog
Books and Other Thoughts
Bart’s Bookshelf

Tell me if I missed yours!

Beginning Fellowship

Wow, it has been a long time since I read Lord of the Rings.  I own a shiny hardback box set of them, which I got on sale at Bongs & Noodles for $15, and which I now discover are the editions with fold-out maps in the back.  I want to snip the maps out with careful snips and hang them around my room – except I know my snips would not be tidy, and even if they were, the maps would get all Blue-Tac-y in the corners and need to be folded up and stored next time I move, and eventually I would wish the maps were back inside the books.  My cover looks like this:

My edition of Fellowship starts out with an introduction that explains that Tolkien made a lot of revisions.  A LOT.  He revised different texts, in different ways, so that different editions ended up with different information.  Including the well-known case of “Estella Bolger”, which the writer of this introduction seems to think everyone knows about.  This is very boring and several pages too long, and could have been condensed so it said this instead:

Dear Reader,

The edition of Lord of the Rings that you now hold in your hands is the best and most authoritative edition of all the editions that have ever been published.

Kisses,
A Bigger Tolkien Geek Than You

Now that I have written this letter, and been all snarky about the introduction guy, I’ve expanded my mental imagining of what it will be like when I meet Tolkien in heaven. The scene now includes the person who wrote this introduction, Douglas A. Anderson, who will have been talking to an interested and appreciative Professor Tolkien when I interrupt, and who will proceed to stand around looking smug until I realize who he is, remember this blog post, and retire in embarrassment.

I am like, ridiculously excited to be reading this again.  Gandalf mentioned Aragorn in passing to Frodo, and I was all Yes!  Aragorn!  Bring it, Tolkien! though in fact, when I am not being all screen-plagued (“gone Hollywood” did not win the word contest although I wanted it to) by Viggo Mortensen hotness, I actually really like Boromir better, in the books.  Because he is more interesting, and Aragorn is heroic but a bit dull.  I am looking forward to seeing Boromir again.

Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert

Not a reflection on the quality of Committed, but just something I thought of when I started reading it:  I feel like the premise of the book could be tweaked a bit to make it into an obnoxious little romantic comedy starring one of those actresses that do “quirky” roles.  Elizabeth Gilbert, successful journalist and bestselling author, never wants to get married again!  Until a US immigration officer gives her a deadline: Get married in the next year or be an exile forever!  If this were a movie, she would spend the year meeting wildly unsuitable guys and ignoring her bland but adorable next-door-neighbor/coworker/classmate, before finally realizing that her heart’s desire was in her own backyard.

That’s not really the plot though.  Gilbert is in a serious long-term relationship with Felipe from Eat Pray Love, and neither of them wants marriage.  Felipe gets told by immigration he can’t keep coming back into the country for ninety days and then leaving, ninety days and then leaving, and if he wants to stay, he should just marry Liz Gilbert.  And then she spends the year reading all about marriage.

I find this endearing because I expect that’s exactly what I would do.  In fact that’s what I do do.  When I feel suspicious of something, I go a-hunting for things to read about it.  In a-hunting down the facts in the case of De Profundis, I discovered Oscar Wilde was a screaming over-dramatizer.  In a-hunting down the facts about the oral polio vaccine, I discovered the only correlation between it and AIDS was geographical (like, the places that had medical facilities giving out the oral polio vaccine were the same places where AIDS was getting diagnosed more frequently).  In a-hunting down the facts about free speech as it applies to corporations – I am still looking into that actually.  It is very complicated and makes me feel stupid but I will persist because if Justice Stevens (my favorite Justice, y’all, because he is old and extremely brilliant and he wears a bow-tie) feels it is worth a ninety-page dissent, then I suspect it is worth a ninety-page dissent.

(Yes, I have a favorite Supreme Court Justice.  DEAL WITH IT.)

(That last thing, DEAL WITH IT, that was a Better Off Ted reference.  Any of y’all watch Better Off Ted?  Will anyone besides me miss it when it inevitably gets cancelled?)

Gilbert writes about speaking to wives in other countries, as well as to the wives in her own family, about their experiences of marriage.  She writes about the strain on her relationship with Felipe as a result of their being in limbo.  (She wants to travel to Cambodia, and he wants to settle somewhere and have a coffeepot.  I am totally with him.)  Although this book is not as full of action as Eat Pray Love, Gilbert’s wry wit is still in evidence.  She’s a little bit crazy, but she knows that she is crazy, and in what ways, which is nearly as good as not being crazy in the first place.  Plus? She doesn’t talk trash about her family.  Hurrah!

If I had one complaint, it would be that there is not enough of Gilbert talking to people.  She is good at capturing voices, just like John Berendt, and she should do it more frequently.  Indeed all the time.  If I were in charge of the world, that’s what would happen.

Other reviews:

Book Addiction

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

What do you know?  Life sends such unexpected blessings (and this review contains lots of spoilers).  I reread The Hobbit for the first time since I was small, and didn’t want to stab anybody in the eyes.

Except for the dwarves in the beginning; and then Gandalf throughout because, frankly, who made him the king of the world?  He just gets to decide that Bilbo would be good on an adventure and risk his whole life to get a couple of bags of gold?  When it all works out, Gandalf nods and winks and makes wry comments about how good Bilbo was, but, dude, things could have gone another way.  Bilbo pisses off Smaug rather than intriguing him, you’ve got a dead hobbit on your hands.  I bet Gandalf wouldn’t have done so much wry commenting and winking if that had happened!

The Hobbit is about a little hobbit called Bilbo who mostly likes to sit at home comfortably in his hobbit-hole and drink wine and eat cheese; but he is descended from the family of Took, and the Took in him yearns for adventure.  Gandalf the Wizard senses this (for my feelings on that, see above) and sends him off on an adventure with a pack of dwarves who are questing to take back Thorin the Dwarf’s ancestor’s treasure from Smaug the Dragon, who lives in the Lonely Mountain.  On the way, Bilbo becomes intrepid and brave and clever, and he and the dwarves have all sorts of adventures with spiders and Wargs and Gollum.

The thing about episodic books, of which The Hobbit is one, is that each episode has to really grab you in order to keep you engaged.  Many of the events of The Hobbit don’t matter to the overarching plot, killing the dragon and getting the treasure, except insofar as they all contribute to making Bilbo a little braver.  I like Gollum; I like it when Bilbo cleverly helps his friends to escape the wood-elves; and I like it when Bilbo is chatting to Smaug.  I am neutral on Elrond and the spiders, and on Bilbo’s handling of the Arkenstone.  I do not care for the trolls, the goblin tunnels, the Warg fighting, or the fact that, dude, some random human guy shows up and gets to kill Smaug!

The best thing, to me, was definitely Bilbo himself.  He grows as a character, getting braver and more sure of himself, and ultimately being considered the leader of the expedition, but whatever happens, he is always most interested in getting back to his comfy hobbit-hole.  Towards the end he even kinda sells out Thorin to get himself home faster, which, you know, I understand the sentiment, but I’m not sure I applaud the action.  I am curious to see how he changes between the end of The Hobbit and the start of Lord of the Rings, though.  Having read Lord of the Rings a good seven to eight years after The Hobbit, I remember being confused by references to Bilbo’s backstory.

The Lord of the Rings Readalong continues apace!  Loving the Lord of the Rings Readalong!

Angela Johnson

I am having an absolute orgy of reading today.  So far today I have read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, the book of this website, Peter and Max (well, I finished Peter and Max, I didn’t start it today), The First Part Last, and The Pinhoe Egg.  IT IS AMAZING.  I started around nine-forty this morning, and I just cannot believe how quickly these books are zipping by me.  I am taking a break now because I can’t decide which of my books to read next.

When I went to the library for The First Part Last, which I’ve wanted to read for ages but just couldn’t do because I forgot its title and everything about it except it had a teen pregnancy (thanks to Black-Eyed Susan’s for the reminder!), I saw it was a very small book.  Very small and short, and that made me sad because I had heard it was wonderful, so I selected another Angela Johnson book to read as well – if she is so great, better to have two books by her than one, right?  I chose Heaven because the girl on the cover looked luminous:

I read Heaven first because The First Part Last was in large print and I felt I couldn’t be bothered with large print that evening.  Heaven is about a girl called Marley who always gets letters from her uncle Jack, and is responsible for sending him money through the Western Union.  Eventually (spoilers, I suppose, though I saw this coming) she learns that her uncle Jack is really her father, and she finds it difficult to deal with.  With the support of her closest friend Shoogy, and Bobby and his baby Feather, who she babysits for (Feather, she baby-sits, not Bobby), she eventually comes to terms with it.

When I finished Heaven I thought: Oh.  Angela Johnson writes this sort of book.  Issue Books.  This Issue was adoption; the Issue of The First Part Last will be teenage pregnancy.  I thought Angela Johnson was a bit like Caroline B. Cooney is, when Caroline B. Cooney writes about Issues – gentle and predictable, and eventually everyone lives more or less happily ever after.

As soon as I started The First Part Last, I decided I was wrong.  The first two pages convinced me I was wrong.  It turns out she wrote The First Part Last a good bit later, five years later, and you can see she’s grown as a writer.  The First Part Last has a confidence with words and plot that Heaven lacks.  The narrator is Bobby – Bobby from Heaven!  I was totally excited to see him again! – and he talks about his daughter Feather, how he raises her by himself.  The book skips around in time, from the present time of Bobby and Feather living with Bobby’s mother, then his father; to the days of Nia’s pregnancy and how he struggled to deal with it.

It’s a lovely, lovely book.  Just beautifully written.  You know how some books give the impression that they flowed straight out of the author – I nearly always feel this way about Diana Wynne Jones’s books – and others feel (for better or worse) crafted?  The First Part Last feels crafted, for decidedly better.  Oh it was so good.  I want to try Angela Johnson’s other books, the ones she wrote between Heaven and The First Part Last, to discover when all the awesome kicked in.

It seems to me it can be difficult to transcend that feeling of being an Issue book, when it’s YA.  Laurie Halse Anderson managed it in Speak, I thought, but not in Wintergirls (or possibly I just didn’t connect with Wintergirls because it was too upsetting and I was distancing myself); I remember a book called Swallowing Stones that absolutely didn’t do it at all.  I mentioned Caroline B. Cooney – I always liked her books best when they didn’t seem to be trying to deal with Issues – so the Face on the Milk Carton books were not favorites, and neither was that one about burning churches down.  (This comes up in Heaven, which is I suppose the reason I made the connection to Caroline B. Cooney.)

What do you think?  How can YA authors steer clear of being an Issue Book?  Or should they?

Other reviews of Heaven:

Just Books

Other reviews of The First Part Last:

1 More Chapter
things mean a lot
Educating Petunia
Thoughts of Joy

Let me know if I missed yours!

Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett

Recommended by Annie the Superfast Reader.  Don’t Sleep There are Snakes chronicles missionary/anthropologist Daniel Everett’s time with the Pirahã tribe in Brazil.  As a young linguist, Everett moved to Brazil with his family to learn the Pirahã language and translate the Bible into Pirahã, thus to spread the Good News of the Lord.  In learning the language and spending time with the tribe, he found that the Pirahã are so focused on immediacy of experience that they were completely uninterested in the Bible.  They shook his faith.

Going in, I thought this was going to be a personal memoir about Everett’s faith and how it changed as a result of living with thePirahã.  Instead it was far more focused on his learning of the Pirahã language and coming to understand their culture.  Though the writing was far from inspired, his observations of the Pirahã were interesting enough in themselves to be worth reading about.  For instance, they are highly conservative and resistant to outside influences on their culture.  They express a wish to be able to make sturdier canoes, so Everett arranges to bring someone in to show them how to make sturdier canoes.  They make a sample canoe under the instruction of the canoe guy.  They love it!  It is great!  A few days later they ask for another canoe, and when Everett says they know how to make them now, they say “Pirahã don’t make canoes,” and drop it.  Crazy, eh?  Anthropology is insane.

The last third or so of the book is focused primarily on the Pirahã language.  I am curious about linguistics! – but I don’t know enough about it (yet) that I understood all the parts of how the Pirahã language differs from other languages.  If I were wiser, or had taken linguistics classes in college, I might have understood all this better.  I wish I’d taken linguistics in college.  Why did I not do that?

Right at the very end, Everett talks briefly about his attempts to teach the Pirahã about the Christian faith.  They didn’t care about Jesus, because nobody they knew had actually spoken to him, and the Pirahã are all about lived experience.  I wanted to know how all this caused Everett’s faith to change, and in what ways – because I like to know what and why people believe – but he didn’t really go into it.  Alas!

Other reviews:

reading is my superpower
Asylum
Page247

Let me know if I missed yours!

Chrestomanci Chrestomanci Chrestomanci

I can’t get any posting done for heaven’s sake!  I have finished and not reviewed five books I was planning to review.  There are two more books sitting atop the bookshelf by my bed, nearly finished but I don’t want to actually finish them because then I’d have seven books that I was planning to review that I haven’t reviewed yet.  Peter and Max and The Book of Secrets will just have to wait.  I AM ONLY HUMAN.

In a frenzy of love for Diana Wynne Jones, I fetched out Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Conrad’s Fate – they are the ones that feature Chrestomanci as a main character, and I call them the C books, loftily ignoring at least six other books with C-words in the title – and read them all very fast, gobble gobble gobble.  They are not my favorites of all her books, but I was exactly in the mood for them.

The Chrestomanci books were the first DWJ books I picked up after finding The Tough Guide to Fantasyland amusing. and I felt so let down by them.  From The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, I was expecting that same kind of thing, high fantasy that played with high fantasy clichés.  I was expecting, essentially, The Dark Lord of Derkholm.  But what’s good about Diana Wynne Jones is that she manages to write oodles of YA fantasy novels without ever doing the same thing twice.

Virtue though this is on her part, it has led to some pretty severe frustrations on mine.  I read Deep Secret expecting it to have the same Edwardian-but-with-magic setting, only to abandon it in a huff when I found it was closer to being urban fantasy; once I grew to love Deep Secret, I got mad at its sort-of sequel The Merlin Conspiracy for being more country and wildernessy.  I was cross with The Homeward Bounders for not being Power of Three, and then cross with Archer’s Goon for not being The Homeward Bounders, and I am not quite over being cross with The Ogre Downstairs for not being Archer’s Goon.  I may never forgive Hexwood for not being Deep Secret.  Why isn’t Hexwood Deep Secret, anyway?

Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Conrad’s Fate are the three books that are sort of about being Chrestomanci.  (And maybe The Pinhoe Egg but I have not read it enough times to be sure.)  In Charmed Life, orphan siblings Cat and Gwendolen come to live at Chrestomanci Castle, Gwendolen seeking to carry out the rather nasty plans of her magic tutors, and Cat simply wanting to be looked after.  This does not prove a good desire for Cat, and the book turns on his claiming agency – not at Chrestomanci’s behest, or to help Gwendolen, but because he wants to manage his own life himself.

The Lives of Christopher Chant tips us backward to Chrestomanci’s youth, when he is a young boy called Christopher with useless parents and a penchant for traveling to alternate worlds (which he calls “Anywheres”).  (Everyone in DWJ’s books has useless parents.  Even the nice parents are useless.)  Christopher’s shady uncle Ralph employs him to bring things back from the other worlds, which Christopher does because he admires Uncle Ralph desperately.  As the reader can see from the beginning, Ralph is Up to No Good, but he is dashing and has a winning smile; whereas the old man Chrestomanci that Christopher has to go live with?  Old and cranky.  So this one’s about Christopher being slung between these two opposing forces in the world of magic, and figuring out where he wants to align himself.

Then Conrad’s Fate is set in a whole different world, one of Christopher’s Anywheres, more properly called Series Seven.  Conrad works in a bookshop near the grand mansion of Stallery, and in Stallery there are magicians who keep changing the world slightly.  The magicians in Conrad’s town realize that Conrad has an Evil Fate left over from a previous life, a Fate that can only be expiated if he kills the person he was supposed to kill in his last life.  Conrad is to take a place as a servant at Stallery in order to kill the person, and get rid of his Evil Fate.  While there, he meets Christopher, an arrogant, charming enchanter from another world, who is taking a place as a servant at Stallery too, in order to find a friend of his that’s gone missing.

This is my point about Diana Wynne Jones.  Even when she’s writing in the same world for several books, Diana Wynne Jones takes the world and swivels it, and gives us it again from a different angle, so that the books in the series end up being very different.  We see Chrestomanci as his adult self in Charmed Life, terrifying and vague and polite; we see him as a child, from his own perspective, in Lives of Christopher Chant; and we see him at a halfway point in Conrad’s Fate, through the eyes of a kid who doesn’t, necessarily, appreciate Christopher’s high-handed approach to life.

What I’m trying to say is this: If you have tried DWJ and only liked one of her books, you may be suffering from the same expectations gap that plagues me every time I read a new one of her books. The key may be to start her books having absolutely no expectations at all. In fact it was foolish of you even to read this review.