By Diana Wynne Jones
One liner: Read it! Have savory pastry on hand; you’ll get hungry with descriptions of perfect pasties, cream cakes, and flan.
Nose-in-a-book girl gets dragooned into housesitting a wizard’s house and by twists and turns, saves the kingdom. Standard coming-of-age fare, and well told. However, what fascinated me in this book was the house of many ways itself. What seems like a run-down, two-room cottage at the edge of the capital town of a quaint mountain country, is actually a huge complex that has been folded and folded again, ad infinitum, in space and time. It also invisibly intersects all manner of places in town, with the windows of the wizard’s workroom overlooking the river in the capital, yet the window at the end of the bedroom hallway leading out into a mountain meadow a full cliffside away from the house itself. Owned by wizard Melicot several centuries ago, the ways are incompletely explored by the current owner, and with constant glimpses of rooms (and sometimes caverns) that somehow overlap the rooms that Charmain uses, the house has definite “mysterious allure” (wink) that had me mentally imagining what other secrets and still places it holds. As a perk, we again see Sophie, Howl, and Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle; the food is written of with divine skill; and any lover of books will sympathize with protagonist Charmain, who sometimes just wants to sit down for a good read while coping with her changing life and abilities.
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