quiet/update

Things have been quiet here for awhile; I try not to get too personal here, so I'll only say my absence has been due mainly to the sudden and unexpected death of my mother in early February. The disruption in my life this has caused has been, to say the very least, considerable. I've also been quite busy with teaching this semester; both courses meet three days a week, which makes every day except Saturday into a teaching/prep day. I've chosen to teach books that, for the most part, I've never taught before, too, so that has required more prep than usual (I also misjudged and assigned several very long YA texts for my Representing Adolescence class). I did a week of picturebooks in my Childhood's Books class, the first time I've ever taught picturebooks in such a concentrated way. I often use Where the Wild Things Are as a way to teach/demonstrate close reading, but rarely as part of the canon of children's literature (I also did Green Eggs and Ham and David Wiesner's The Three Pigs - I had a fantastic week doing prep for picturebook week). I have also realized that I am terrible at teaching Diana Wynne Jones, for all that I passionately love her books; my critical faculties just wilt in the face of her brilliance. I tried teaching Charmed Life, and they were underwhelmed. The only Jones book I have had any luck with teaching is (of course) Howl's Moving Castle. I don't know what to call it if something is both your weak spot and your favorite thing, but Diana Wynne Jones is mine. I think I can live with this.

I've been thinking a lot about adolescence and high school and YA and YA dystopian fiction; I had the incredible good fortune to have a fantastic group in my Representing Adolescence class, and our discussions were consistently thought-provoking and intriguing. I've been working on some of my ideas about dystopian YA, and hope to post that before too much longer. I also have my dissertation to work on, as well as converting some papers and draft chapters into articles for submission. A busy summer of work ahead, which is good.

In the meantime, Jonathan Auxier has a new book coming out in May, and he is writing about becoming a writer - "After the book deal" - on blogs around the internet - check out what he has to say (he's quite smart). The book, The Night Gardener, has been getting very, very good advance buzz, and I'm keen to get my hands on a copy; I've already placed a hold on a library copy.

Thus the quietness around here, and the plans, or hopes anyway, for making at least a little bit of noise in the near future.

Sequels, Crushes and Dalemark

I've been binge-reading Diana Wynne Jones again lately; I think it's because she's my go-to comfort reading, and in this dissertation/conference-heavy summer, I need some comforting. I've also been prompted by the DWJ2012 tumblr to think more about how her books work for me.

I just finished The Crown of Dalemark, the fourth book in the Dalemark quartet. The first time I tried a Dalemark book, I struggled with it, and felt disappointed. The fantasy of it felt wrong; I was expecting fantasy more in the lines of Chrestomanci or Howl. Of course I gave the books another go-round, and by the time I read The Crown of Dalemark for the first time, I was thoroughly smitten.

Diana Wynne Jones (I always think her full name, like Nick does with Maxwell Hyde) is a tricky one with sequels. At first I hated it; now, I'm come to admire and in most cases enjoy her sequel-making habits. The tricksy part is this: our hero/protagonist of the first book is very rarely the main character of the sequel. In fact, it can take chapters and chapters to find a meaningful connection between the first and second books. Chrestomanci is an exception; a perfect example is Deep Secret and The Merlin Conspiracy. Deep Secret ends in our own world, and is almost entirely narrated by Rupert Venables and Maree Mallory. The Merlin Conspiracy opens in another world entirely - Blest, which feels much like high-fantasy - following an entirely new set of characters, and is narrated by Roddy. We have to go in quite a ways before we encounter Nick, Maree's half-brother; he makes brief mention of Maree and Rupert, then we never hear of them again.
I've come to think of the way she structures her sequels as Related Worlds, rather than true sequels.

But Dalemark is a bit different; the first two books are building toward the fourth; the third is seriously deep history of Dalemark. Reading them in sequence, right after each other, can be a little frustrating; Moril is just setting off at the end of Cart & Cwidder, and then Drowned Ammet starts in an entirely new location with a whole new main character - and never even mentions Moril.
You have to work to get to the payoff, but when you get there, it's huge.

The Crown of Dalemark may be the book by Diana Wynne Jones I've found most personally affecting; I get all kinds of teary at the end, even on multiple re-reads. It's just such a gorgeously-written and emotionally honest book - as well as being structurally honest. Maewen's time-traveling doesn't pull punches; like Margaret Mahy's Maddigan's Fantasia, visitors from the future have to go back to their own time. There's no clever way around it. Thinking about it, I realize my reaction to the end of The Crown of Dalemark is very like my reaction to the end of The Amber Spyglass, a book I have had to stop rereading because of the buckets of tears it produces from me.

On the DWJ2012 tumblr, there has been more than one post quoting Diana on the subject of Howl:

And the procession of people, which was enormous already, has increased--doubled and tripled--of all the people who want to marry Howl. Now it seems to me that Howl would be one of the most dreadful husbands one could possibly imagine.

I was amused to read this; I've always had a crush on Howl, and it makes me happy to think of thousands of readers around the world similarly crushing on this fictional wizard from Wales. I've never particularly wanted to marry Howl, though; my fictional crushes are restricted to, well, being fictional. But reading this, and realizing I don't want to marry Howl, made me wonder: If I had to pick a Diana Wynne Jones character to marry, who would it be? 

And of course, the answer is: Mitt. He's an incredibly well-crafted character, and interestingly crafted, as well; he has all kinds of useful skills - fishing and sailing and finding directions by stars and eluding pursuers - but they're all hard-earned skills resulting from work. A childhood of labor makes Mitt the resourceful and handy person he is, not some kind of obnoxious inherent talent for everything. He's complicated; he's both emotional and rational; he's kind, even when he's trying to be nasty. He laughs and jokes, in earnest and to cover his real feelings. He has great ideas - big ideas - without even realizing he has them. And, though it's used against him in Drowned Ammet, he actually is a free spirit; Mitt does what Mitt thinks is right. And yes - Old Ammet and Libby Beer are pushing at him, but we're given the sense that Mitt could also walk away. He's given choices by the Undying (who themselves are limited by The One).

A few moments in the book stand out as particularly wonderful, either because of Diana Wynne Jones's genius for saying so much in a few words, or because of Mitt's awesomeness. For example: "Mitt slid his hand carefully down Maewen's arm and took hold of her hand. It was the most momentous and the most exciting thing he had ever done in his life."  Up until this point, we get small, almost businesslike, glimpses of Mitt's feelings about Maewen; he refers to it as "calf-love," and tries to shrug it off. It's not a major topic of conversation or exposition. But that line - "it was the most momentous and the most exciting thing he had ever done in his life" - tells us everything. And it somehow perfectly captures that feeling - strongest in adolescence, but not restricted to it by any means - of momentousness that comes with the first expression of love.

Maewen's grief after returning to her own time is also a masterpiece of writing: "Grief thundered down on her, hard and continuous as the waterfall at Dropwater. ... Even with both taps full on, the water did not pour as fiercely as grief poured on Maewen. ... She found she remembered things about Mitt she had not even known she had seen until now."

the water and the grief - it's a gorgeous mixing of the two, and feels even more significant because of the importance water plays in all four books. Water and rivers and the sea and the gods and the Undying and the One - all mixed in with Maewen's grief and loss. It's beautiful, and heartbreaking.

And then there's the message, the huge romantic sentiment, that reveals more of Mitt's feelings for her: "He named a whole palace after me, and I'll never be able to say thank you!"

Because of the time disjuncture, and Maewen's sense of grief at this point, Mitt's naming of the palace doesn't come off as corny or hokey or sentimental. We know he can't have built or named the palace for several years after Maewen returns to her own time; we know he's been thinking about her for years. The act of naming registers as important, as something physically tremendous and important to stand for something emotionally tremendous and important.

Everything Mitt does up until this point is, to me anyway, appealing and charming and crush-worthy, but the naming of the palace reveals an even greater depth of character and a new facet of his personality, and it is this, I think, that makes him my choice for most marriageable Diana Wynne Jones character.

myths and the merlin conspiracy

I'm re-reading (for the zillionth time) The Merlin Conspiracy, because I don't have a to-read list going this summer. And I keep sighing over its wonderful complexity, and the huge range of myth and folklore Diana Wynne Jones manages to cram into that book.

I taught it in Myth & Folktale class, where it was either not read, or read and reviled by those philistines. It was crushing for me, because I always want my students to enjoy their readings; because I love DWJ and can't abide criticism of her books; and because it includes so many aspects of myth and folktale that we'd already talked about in class.

Some of the myth/folklore elements in the book, in no particular order:

• Arthurian legend (The Merlin, the Count of Blest)
• Welsh legend (Gwyn ap Nud)
• British faerie beings (Little People, the invisible people, etc)
• Geoffrey of Monmouth's Red and White Dragons myth (which, yes, is related to Arthurian legend, but is also its own thing)
• flower lore (speedwell, mullein, purple vetch...)
• city lore (Salisbury, Old Sarum, Manchester in a red dress)
• totem or spirit animals
• standard magic lore (earth magics, etc)
• basic fairytale motifs (things happening in threes, especially the "rules" of the dark paths)

The abundance of magics and folklore in the book sometimes makes me think it's an even richer, more complex text than I already know it to be, as if perhaps somehow Diana Wynne Jones was able to work an actual spell into or with her book, that perhaps the combination of all those elements works like alchemy to produce something Else, something Other, something beyond the everyday alchemy of fiction and reading.

A Diana Wynne Jones Alphabet

In response to alphabooks, I started thinking about characters with names beginning with some of the more obscure letters of the alphabet, which led me (naturally, since most things do) to Diana Wynne Jones. I got to thinking some more, and I've decided to try to make an alphabet of characters (place names in a pinch *if I have to*) from her books.s i

There are, of course, plenty of names I could have chosen for a lot of the letters; I tried to have some representative distribution across books. "X" is my major failure - I can't think of an X name. And my other rule for myself was: NO PEEKING. No looking in books - this is all from memory. So if there's an X, even an obscure one, it isn't lodged in my memory accessibly enough.
it was fun to compile. I may play with similar lists in the future, simply as a kind of game to relax my brain after pummeling it to do dissertation work.

Ammet
Blade
Chrestomanci (of course!)
Dillian
Erskine
Fifi
Gwendolen
Howl (obviously!)
Isodel
Jamie
Kialan
Lydda
Maewen
Nan
Olga
Polly
Querida
Rupert
Sirius
Tanaqui
Umru
Vivian Smith/ Venturus/Vierran (so many V-names, which is unusual; I had to include a few)
Wend
Xanadu structures in The Merlin Conspiracy (I can NOT think of any X names - suggestions?)
Yam
Zenobia Bailey

13 months after the death of Diana

I discovered Diana Wynne Jones during a particularly trying phase of my life. I had graduated from college, and in the summer of 2001, I moved to DC with my then-boyfriend so he could attend law school. I applied for job after job after job, but it turned out that a degree in British and American literature from a school no one's heard of doesn't open too many doors. After temping for awhile (including through September 11, 2001), I got hired as an administrative assistant at a children's literacy nonprofit. I seem to have a knack for finding jobs that mostly require me to sit around doing nothing, and this one was no different. In fact, my work day was maybe two hours of actual work, and six hours of clock-watching and fretting. BUT! One of the few tasks my manager (who was very difficult to work with, and not very nice to me) delegated was looking up children's literature resources online. And I found the child_lit listserv, which was life-changing. I've been on the list since either December 2001 or January 2002.

Almost as soon as I joined the list, I started seeing mentions of a book I'd never heard of, Howl's Moving Castle, by a writer I'd never heard of.  It seemed that every request for suggestions or recommendations that anyone made (including, I think, myself) was met instantly with Howl's Moving Castle. These replies were often accompanied by exclamation points, or the verbal equivalent of an exclamation point.

At that point I hadn't yet set my mind on children's literature as my field of study; I was applying to grad schools with the (in retrospect, hilariously misguided) idea that I wanted to work in marxist theory. But I'd done my undergraduate thesis on children's lit, and so had a fair amount of interest in the field. But aside from Harry Potter and Philip Pullman, I hadn't read much contemporary children's fiction.

Howl's Moving Castle, when I finally got it from the public library, was a revelation.  I've read it so many times since then that it's hard to recall exactly what my initial impressions were, but I do remember that I ate that book up in no time. It was the kind of book you hate to see drawing to a close - those few pages remaining in your right hand seem like the end of the world. I was swept right off my feet by that book, and frankly, I still am, every time I read it.
As soon as I finished it, I made a beeline for the library to get more. Somehow I ended up with just one Wynne Jones title - Dogsbody - which kind of disappointed me. I was charmed with her descriptions of cat behavior in that book, because I have cats of my own who I dote upon, but the story couldn't hold a candle to Howl's Moving Castle. Thinking back on it, I realize I probably started with the two most poorly matched books in her oeuvre; though both are fantastic,work in very different ways. The only worse choice, I think, would have been Hexwood or maybe Fire & Hemlock.

After Dogsbody, I almost gave up on her.

I thought maybe she was a one-trick pony; I thought maybe I just had different tastes from the list members, most of whom were quite a few years older than my 22-year-old self.

I cannot think how different my life would be if I hadn't kept going, if I hadn't made my way back to the "J" section of that lovely, shabby old Georgetown public library's children's section. It was on the second floor and usually fairly empty - it's a small library, and old and unrenovated, lots of old wood and low bookcases and big windows overlooking tree-lined streets. It did, however, have a lot of Diana Wynne Jones titles, possibly because that library didn't seem to stock much published after 1990.

I don't know what I read next after Dogsbody, or how I came to read it. I suspect it was a Chrestomanci title, but if that's the case, it was either Witch Week  or The Lives of Christopher Chant.
And from then I was lost, absolutely lost, to the wit and charm and creativity and imagination and emotional force of Diana Wynne Jones. No other writer has given me so many hours of happy reading, of amusement, and anticipation, enthusiasm and excitement, hopefulness and happiness, sadness and solace. My world has become one that is permanently, indelibly marked by her books, and that is just exactly the way I want it.

One of the things I love best about her books is the way she so deftly creates characters who feel real, recognizable, fully-developed. She doesn't need pages and pages of exposition, or obnoxious conversations that exist in the text only to reveal the emotional state of a character. Somehow, her people are real in a way that characters in other books often aren't. Even in books with numerous protagonists, like Dark Lord of Derkholm, we get to know Shona, Mara, Querida, Derk, Blade, even Kit and Callette and the other griffins, intimately. With just a few well-chosen adjectives, with the decision to have Derk sigh or Querida shake her head, these characters become people, each entirely individual and unique, the way real, living and breathing humans are. It's tiny details, like Sophie's relief that, though the cursed suit may have caught her, Howl doesn't like her (so she thinks). It's the speech patterns of Pretty, that colt of infinite spirit. It's the hidden prettiness in the Last Governess's face, the sacred face of Helen, the fancy dressing-gowns of Chrestomanci, the spectacles - and lens treatments - of Maree Mallory and Rupert Venables. Tiny details that, in books jampacked with action and activity, fill in the background with a richness so complete one almost doesn't notice it. The aliveness of the characters feels organic - as if, like Roddy when Nick sees her on the dark paths, the characters had simply grown there.

Reading Diana Wynne Jones in the early 2000s definitely helped push me along the path to children's literature scholarship as a full-time professional occupation. The void left when I had exhausted the library's supply of her books forced me to seek out other fantasy writers, other YA and children's authors. The bits of knowledge her books have imparted to me have pushed me further along; the flower files in The Merlin Conspiracy made me spend more time researching before working on my own garden; the Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer stories in Fire and Hemlock led me to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, and helped me understand Franny Billingsley's Chime.

One thing, however, that reading Diana Wynne Jones has not led me to: choosing her books as the subjects for my academic writing. I've made a point of including her books on my syllabi, but I won't write about them as part of my scholarly work. They are, somehow, too important to me, too much a part of the fabric of my mind, to be laid out on the critical dissecting table. Even when I teach her books, I inevitably tell my students that really, we read Howl's Moving Castle just because it's so good. That all I really want them to do with that text is enjoy it, and let it lead them to more of Diana Wynne Jones's novels.

I don't usually experience the deaths of "celebrities" or artists whose work I like as a deeply personal loss; it's always sad, it's always a reason to pause and re-appreciate their work, but I rarely feel anything that I might honestly call grief because of it. But when I learned of Diana's passing last year, it felt like a truly personal loss. When I read Neil Gaiman's tribute post to/about her, I cried, because I was already teary-eyed with sorrow and irretrievable loss. I placed a black ribbon image, with her dates attached, on my blog, intending to keep it there for awhile in memoriam. It's still there; even after a year, I don't want to take that down.
I wish, like Sophie, I could say "have another thousand years!" and keep Diana alive and healthy and writing. But I can't. That kind of magic only exists in  the kind of stories that Diana Wynne Jones wrote: the very best stories.

Diana Wynne Jones

It's been one year now since Diana Wynne Jones passed away. I've re-read (and re-re-read) any number of her books between then and now; I've just finished up a DWJ reading binge that included The Power of Three, Conrad's Fate, The Homeward Bounders, Hexwood, Unexpected Magic, and Deep Secret. Tonight, I read a few chapters from Howl's Moving Castle, the first book by Diana Wynne Jones I ever read. I know that book backward and forward and around sideways. It's a wonderful book, and it never, ever fails to enchant me.

I'd like one of Cesari's cream cakes to eat while reading it, but that's the only lack I ever experience in connection with the book.

Jones is such a smart writer, with such a good sense of humor, such a sense of timing and emotion and subtlety. I admire her every time I revist any of her books, even ones like Howl that I've read solidly into my memory.

I think of her often; I never met her, of course, had nothing at all to do with her except I read her books with a compulsive voracity. But I still think of her often, and I think how grand her books are, and I think what a loss it is - and it is, to me, still a wrenching sense of loss - that she will not be creating any more wonders.

I miss you, Diana Wynne Jones, and I am so, so grateful and glad to have your books in my life.

from an Almost Anywhere

found this odd candelabra in a thrift store in Pittsburgh. I grabbed it up immediately, because it reminded me of one of the gifts Christopher Chant brings back through the Place Between.

"he went to an Anywhere where a man under a yellow umbrella gave him a sort of candlestick of little bells" (The Lives of Christopher Chant, Diana Wynne Jones).

It doesn't chime - it's just a candlestick, really, no bells at all - but it looks very like I picture Christopher's much more lovely and otherworldly chiming bells. And so I had to have it for myself.

Related Worlds: Diana Wynne Jones

I can't be as eloquent on this topic as Neil Gaiman; I don't have the same personal connection to DWJ as some people had. I haven't even had a lifelong relationship with her. But I have loved her books - and because I love her books, I love her. The news of her death has made me feel sad, and it has provoked me to re-visit a number of her titles; her books are always great comfort reading. And reading the tributes paid to her by her friends and colleagues and fans make me appreciate anew just what a marvellous writer she was.


I found DWJ via the child_lit listserv, when I was a sad young pup just out of college, working miserable office-assistant jobs in Washington, DC. I was not terribly happy back then; I didn't quite know what I wanted to be doing with my life, but it turned out that - despite my BA in British and American literature - I wasn't qualified to do much of anything at all. Money was tight, I had been temping for almost a year and living partially off my credit card; I had just started an actual administrative assistant job, and didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't have any friends yet in DC area.

But I had found - actually through that admin assistant job, which turned out to be pretty terrible - the child_lit listserv, and all the smart readerly, writerly people on it. And lots of list-serv posters mentioned Howl's Moving Castle, repeatedly; I got intrigued enough to write down the title and author and go to the public library in Arlington, Virginia.
This is the cover of the edition I borrowed. A hardcover, with that protective film, stiffened and crackling and worn with age and use.

I loved this book, from the first time I read it. I ate it up. I ran back to the library for more, and somehow got Dogsbody, which was a slight disappointment. But I persisted; I think I moved on to the Chrestomanci books next, though I can't really recall the specifics. I was lucky enough to have libraries that had shelves full of Diana Wynne Jones's books; I had no extra money for buying books (still don't have much of it). Over time, I've accumulated my own shelf-full of her books - and she has her own shelf, which is packed nearly full when all the books are in their places.

The full shelf is a rare sight, though, because I re-read her books on a very regular basis. There are always a couple that are lying out, near my bed (right now, Time of the Ghost and Black Maria), or perhaps in my living room.

I have kept her books out of my critical, academic life. It isn't that they aren't great material for critical analysis; they are. It's not that they're outside my field; they aren't. It's more that, for me, her books epitomize what great writing does for the reader who isn't a professional reader. It's not just entertainment, or escapism, or amusement; it's far more than that. It's transformative. It's magical, but not in a hokey, pixie-dust kind of way. A great book should both take you right outside yourself and also, simultaneously, make you feel more at home in your own skin, and Diana Wynne Jones's books do that.

I named this blog, where I do write about children's books and YA books and child culture and media, in honor of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the image and the idea of a moving castle; I love Howl's moving castle. But that is as close to "professionalizing" her work as I am going to get, other than teaching it. Analysis doesn't "ruin" a book, but it's important for me to keep her books, which are so gloriously wonderfully readerly and writerly, separate as examples of the magic that happens when a reader and a writer and a book all meet in one place.

When I started teaching, as part of grad school, I was determined to spread the word. I feel, more strongly than about most books, that I must bring the gospel of Diana Wynne Jones. I have recommended Howl's Moving Castle more times than I can count. I once interrupted a dad and his maybe-10-year-old son in a bookstore to recommend it; they were searching for more fantasy titles for the boy to read; he'd gone through all the more recent series. Idiot bookstores here seem to stock very few of her titles, but they can generally be relied upon to carry Howl's Moving Castle. When I worked at one of those bookstores, I made Howl a "bookseller recommendation," and pushed her titles hard.
Naturally, Howl was the DWJ title I first included in one of my syllabi. It wasn't a perfect fit with the theme I had developed - which was journeys; I expanded it to include other-worlds, which gave me the in I needed for Howl - but I was determined to teach it. Then - and ever since then - when I include a DWJ title, it is with a bit of recklessness, a feeling that the book may not actually fit the theme, or do much to advance our thinking on a particular topic; but it's a great book, and it's important for these undergrads to be exposed to great books.

That first class loved Howl, as have a number of classes since then. I've tried teaching a few other of her books - most recently, just two weeks before her death, The Merlin Conspiracy, to an ungrateful batch of serpent's teeth who were confused more than enchanted by the book. But Howl has always been received enthusiastically; many of the students, when they see the publication date (1986) are perplexed and slightly outraged that they didn't know about it sooner.

I love that their joy in discovering the book is so strong that they feel indignant about not knowing it earlier; they feel they have missed out on something.

They tell me, almost wonderingly, that it's better than Harry Potter!

And of course: it is. All of Diana Wynne Jones's books are better than Harry Potter, though I am a Potter fan. But DWJ's books soar, while also keeping at least one foot planted solidly on the ground. Her books bring magic and fantasy and wonder and delight and awe, all while casting a sidelong glance and a bit of a wink at the reader. Even when she takes on Epic Battles Between Good and Evil, she is never working in cliche, or simple tropes. Good and Evil become vastly complex, confusing and confused, complicated people, or ideas, or things. Her characters - and her readers - have to work through the confusion and the complexity, searching for solutions, answers, explanations. Her more intricate books - Hexwood, Time of the Ghost and the one that has stymied me the most, Fire and Hemlock - demand re-reads. You haven't really read the book until you've read it more than once - or for me, half a dozen times, often with mental contortions and an internal monologue of my own that makes me picture Sophie stamping her foot and shouting "Confound it!" while throwing about weed-killer.

On the child_lit listserv, we've talked often about our "comfort" reading: the books we go to again and again and again. Howl's Moving Castle is probably my number-one comfort read; for more than a year of grad school, I was reading it at least once a month. But all of her other titles are in frequent comfort-reading rotation. None of them bore me; none of them get tired, or stale, or old. Even knowing half the text of Howl by heart doesn't keep me from getting caught up in it.

There are many great books in this world, and I've read a respectable number of the ones in English. Really good fantasy - well, any really good book - makes you think but also pulls you into the world of the book. You get lost in the world (or worlds) of the book.

Diana Wynne Jones's books do this, and more, because her books - her characters - are somehow truly alive. I mean this in an almost-literal sense. I don't have to fall into the world of the story; when I open Howl's Moving Castle, at random, the story is there, alive, waiting for me: Calcifer is crackling and refusing to bend down his head; Sophie is snorting at Howl's lies; the streets of Porthaven are visible through the window. Christopher Chant is scrambling through the Place Between, the man with the yellow umbrella has that wonderful chiming stick of bells, the hushed and formal Castle under Gabriel de Witt is industriously and decorously going about its business. Even now, the large families in Caprona are laughing, scolding, joking, singing, spellcasting, squabbling, eating; the wonders of Time City are being enjoyed, used, cared for by the Lees and other inhabitants, and by the many visitors from all the Stable Eras. The white Dragon is asleep in the chalk hills; Jamie is walking the lonely Bounds. Maewen is making her way to Dropwater, where she will (she must!) find Mitt.  All the many animals - all those wonderful cats, and the dogs, Helga the demonic goat, Molly, the unicorn-in-disguise Molly, the quacks, the baby dragon, Mini the lady elephant - they're all going about their business, eating and licking legs unconcernedly and nosing for treats. They are real enough and live enough that even without a reader, they are there. Diana Wynne Jones was a magic-user, and her magic was strong, stronger than most - strong like Venturus, the seventh son; strong like Roddy, whose own gift is enhanced by the hurt lady's knowledge - and Diana Wynne Jones's magic was with words, words that could create and maintain many worlds.

And, as Mrs Fairfax notes at the end of Howl's Moving Castle, "That is the neatest use of words of power I have ever seen."

Requiescat in Pace, Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones has died.

This is heartbreaking news, though she had been ill for several years. She is the absolute master of contemporary fantasy for younger readers; her books have an entire shelf to themselves at my house. Her books are my go-to comfort reading; they are among my very favorite books, ever. Howl's Moving Castle, of course, is the source for the title of this blog.


Judith of Misrule, a dedicated Diana Wynne Jones reader, offers perhaps the best tribute, in the form of a quotation from one of Jones's books, The Magicians of Caprona:

For, as Paolo and Tonino Montana were told over and over again, a spell is the right words delivered in the right way.

Diana Wynne Jones made magic of one kind and another with her words, in all of her books. She will be missed, most greatly.