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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: March 29, 2011 at 6:15 pm by Eve Tushnet

2011-03-29T18:15:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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MY SOUL IS BEING DRAGGED TO UTTAR PRADESH! …TO UTTER DESTRUCTION I MEAN. Diana Wynne Jones, RIP.

She is one of my most beloved children’s authors. Everybody has a unique list of favorite DWJ novels. I’ll talk a little bit about mine, here, and also try to indicate what made her writing so fantastic overall.

Fire and Hemlock. What’s odd is that I’ve never managed to keep the plot of this retelling of the Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer legends straight, even as I started to consider it one of Jones’s best books. It’s longer and “older” than most of her stuff–shading into adolescence, rather than firmly embedded in childhood–and there’s erotic tension appropriate for the age group. The girl, the “Janet,” is self-dramatizing and unpleasant in a way I am pretty sure I was at her age! This is a much less moralistic tale than The Secret Garden (which I also love) but the exposure of the protagonist’s flaws is equally unsparing.

Dogsbody. A bullied girl finds solace in her pet dog… who just happens to be the personification of the Dog Star, Sirius, sent to earth to learn humility and reclaim the weapon used by his beloved and treacherous Companion star.

DWJ is often at her best when she’s showing a fractured and barely-mended family in which the children have to bond together despite one another. A lot of people have noted how self-absorbed the parents in her books often are, how neglectful or actively harmful. And here we get to see two “blended families”: Kathleen and her cousins (her father is an imprisoned Irish terrorist), and Sirius and the cats of the household. We see how the “insiders” have become defensive and cold as a result of the father’s neglect and the mother’s bullying; we see how the “outsiders,” Kathleen and Sirius, bargain for small concessions; and we see, I think, how even the ferocious mother is a real person, with real emotions, whose tragedy is precisely that she exists in her own world and doesn’t understand what she’s done to her children (and her cats!).

I love this book so much. I identified very strongly with Sirius, with his uncontrollable temper and his sense of how humiliating it is to have to relearn one’s place in the world. This is one of the books which shaped me as a person.

Cart and Cwidder. Another patchwork family. Political tensions between north and south (I’m pretty sure those were the terms–?) force itinerant singer Clennen and his kids to make nice with bratty Kialan and his brother, sons of a northern rebel. Again I seriously overidentified with Kialan. He’s just so awful!–and yet Jones seems to understand what it would feel like to be the kid who is always doing or saying the unhelpful thing, when everyone around you is being intensely responsible and you feel incapable of matching them. There’s an immense amount of wonder in this book, as well, with mountains moving and ancient legends fulfilled.

Witch Week. One of her funniest–even though it includes scenes in which a child imagines what it will be like when he is burnt to death for witchcraft! The backdrop of this story is incredibly dark–it’s set at a boarding school in which almost all the children have lost family members to witch-hunting, and all of them fear that they might be next on the fiery agenda–and yet the tone is “school story” and hilarious. Insightful (I used a diary code similar to Charles’s when I was a teen) and bittersweet. The adults are unhelpful, but less actively-harmful than in most of Jones’s books.

The Ogre Downstairs. Maybe her most forgiving book–although she’s a forgiving author, in general. Stepchildren need to learn to work together to manage a magical chemistry set. Tons of fun (the bit where they gild the horrific wedding gifts is priceless), moments of genuine wonder in between things like chocolate bars wandering down the hallway, and huge amounts of sympathy for everyone involved, even the stepfather who is the “ogre” in the title.

Witch’s Business. Published in the UK as Own Back, Ltd. A rare Jones with explicit discussion of class conflict! But again, kids band together despite intense personal dislike, and through compromise and sympathy they defeat the adult enemy. Plus, they run a revenge-for-hire business!

Power of Three. Children from three species (basically fairy/normal, human/Giant, and fishything) must band together to lift a curse. Includes some really powerful scenes of what it feels like to be waiting to be caught, as a kid; learning the weakness of the adults whom you love; and discovering that your place in the world is simultaneously more important and much more unpleasant than you realized.

The Homeward Bounders. Probably the saddest children’s story I’ve ever read. Jamie “walks the bounds,” crossing the lines between universes, and meets the ferocious Helen and the seemingly-servile Joris (Joris? can’t remember how his name is spelled). Includes some of Jones’s most horror-show moments, like Helen’s cannibal hand or the mud-colored soldiers’ uniforms. The awesomely funny bits, like the pantomime horse or the cricket game, only make the final lines more heartbreaking.

Howl’s Moving Castle. This is just a confection. Young Sophie is cursed to live as an old woman; she goes to work for rakish wizard Howl, and becomes entangled in his bizarre puzzlebox of a life, as he tries to work free of a curse of his own. A charming, funny, magical book, with John Donne and a soap-operatic scarecrow and lots of hats.

Charmed Life. Typically absurd magic (the evil dough stuck to the floor is especially memorable) with a terrifying older sister who is willing to sacrifice almost anything for power. As always with Jones, childhood is no refuge.

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