In October I read...

1. House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones

YA fantasy. Set in the same world as Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. Bookish Charmain Baker has one, rather impractical desire in life, which is to gain a post in the king's library. When her aunt volunteers her for the post of looking after a Royal Wizard's house while he's away, she sees a chance to get away from her overly protective and respectable parents and apply to the king for the library position. But looking after the wizard's house isn't a charge she can ignore while doing more important things: there are a thousand household tasks she has literally no idea how to accomplish - they never came up in her reading -, the spellbooks turn pages and mix you up when you're not looking, and most importantly, the house has different rooms depending how you go through the doorways, and you can get a frightening amount of lost in no distance at all. But none of this is as bad as meeting a terrifying lubbock and uncovering a sinister royal plot that goes back years.

This is as hectic and charming as all good Diana Wynne Jones stories. I like Charmain a lot, and I especially like the dynamic she has with Peter, the apprentice who turns up wet and bedraggled a few days into her stay and helps her keep house. At first it seems as though he's going to be the irritating impractical boy who expects people to do things for him, and Charmain the impatient girl on the moral highground chivvying him into line. Instead they take turns being impractical, and Peter calls Charmain on it when she's being selfish, and he has a better idea about housework than Charmain does but still not much of one. They're kind of awesome, and I wanted a lot more of them in the house together than we got, once it all started to be about royal plots and lubbokins. (Peter glowered at her from under the twisted, dripping ends of his hair. "I wanted a cup of tea," he said. "You make tea with boiling water." Charmain had never made tea in her life. She shrugged. "Do you really?") I love the idea of the house and its many ways - even more than the moving castle, I think - and I would have liked to see it be a bigger part of the plot. The plot itself is sort of messy, and at heart rather simplistic. The villains, in particular, are disappointingly one-dimensional, and evil by birth, which isn't a concept I love. Sophie and Howl are featured, and their small son Morgan, but they weren't a highlight in particular, for me. Howl was in disguise most of the book, which didn't help.

The most striking thing for me was how much it felt like a Chrestomanci book, rather than a Howl book. A big part of this was the age group it was aimed at, which was definitely younger than Howl's Moving Castle. There was no love story, there were illustrations at the opening of each chapter, and as I said the plot was fairly basic, underneath the DWJ curlicues. It also felt less self contained than either Howl's Moving Castle or Castle in the Air. Both of those were complete stories, with a feel to them unlike any of her other books. They used stories and folklore to stand out: HMC used fairy tale tropes, three sisters and seven league boots and witches' curses; CitA used Arabian Night-style prose and subplots. House of Many Ways doesn't do anything like that, and the plot isn't neat enough to make it feel unique and complete. It's an episodic story with magical mishaps, like the Chrestomanci books. I'd put it next to The Pinhoe Egg and call them twins. Which isn't really a criticism, because I like The Pinhoe Egg a lot and I liked this a lot, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.


2. City of Ashes: Book 2 of the Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare

YA urban fantasy. Clary's life has changed utterly in the last few weeks. She's discovered a world of shadowhunters and downworlders, demons and angelic champions in her city streets, she's discovered a threat to both worlds more dangerous than she'd imagined, and she's discovered a father and brother she didn't know existed: a father in Valentine, the man she knows to be a charismatic monster, and a brother in Jace, the boy she's fallen in love with. It's not exactly the way she wanted to fall in love. Things aren't over, though: Valentine's plans are moving into a new phase, and Jace is in a desperate and deadly amount of trouble with his fellow shadowhunters. And there are still things Clary and Jace don't know about themselves.

I have conflicted opinions of this book. I think that technically, it's much better than the first, City of Bones. The style is more confident and mature, the world is a lot more solid, the sense of the shadowhunters and their world and how it fits in with the downworlders and the city. In fact stylistically this book is really cool: the characters are visually distinct, there's repartee, the action is crisp, and the description is vivid and atmospheric and doesn't waste words. It would work really well on screen. But it took me forever to finish, because even though I enjoyed it whenever I was reading it, I never felt the urge to pick it up again between times; which was because I liked the characters in a mild way - especially Alec and Isabelle Lightwood - but I never really engaged with them. It took me a while to realise why, but I think the problem is that we never get any true depth for them, never really get inside their heads. Clary and Jace and Simon might almost as well not have been point-of-view characters at all, because almost everything I learned about them I learned from their words and actions. Maybe that was part of why I liked Alec and Isabelle best - because I expected to have to work them out from the outside.

The love story didn't catch me up at all, either, and that's a big part of a book not working for me. Part of it's that the incest theme just icks me out - and there's good reason to believe that in the final revelation it won't be incest at all, but that won't matter much if that shadow's hung over the romance through three books. Beyond that, though, the love story rests on the two ideas of Impossible Love and the Love Triangle (Clary, Jace and Clary's best friend Simon). And neither of those are narrative kinks for me, so it's kind of three strikes in three.

I'll read the last book, and I think I'll like it, and I'll even be excited about her new series, because I like her style and I think she's getting steadily better. But I can't say that this book truly worked for me.


3. The Husband Test by Betina Krahn

Period romance. Peril of Whitmore needs a wife, one virtuous enough to please a superstitious population who think they have a curse that needs breaking. The abess of the Convent of the Brides of Virtue needs to find something to do with her young novice Eloise, whose helpfulness is driving her crazy. The solution is to send Eloise with Peril as a Husband Judge, to assess his fitness to receive one of the maidens educated at the convent - in the hope that chemistry will strike, and Eloise may find something she's better suited to than religion.

I went looking through the paperback shelves at the library for a trashy romance, in celebration of being on holidays, and this was the first one I found. And good lord was it trashy. This is basically a meld of Disney's Beauty and the Beast and The Sound of Music, if the Beast/Captain von Trapp had gone on to be the emotionally abusive husbands you know they would have. But I won't mock too hard, because it was exactly what I picked it off the shelf hoping it would be, and it was terrible, but satisfyingly terrible. Although I wish the sex had been even vaguely hot, rather than embarrassing and awful. (The musky scent of maleness means he hasn't bathed in six weeks, y/y?)


COMICS

4. You Asked for It, Charlie Brown by Charles. M. Schulz

tangletale lent me this, when we worked out I hadn't read it yet. Inevitably, I had actually read some of the strips, but there were a few sequences I hadn't - Charlie Brown's paper-bag-over-the-head phase! - and a few things to remind me of why I love these characters an insane amount, and why I like Marcie best. She is the only person in the world who doesn't play baseball, guys. She still tries to sell tickets to their completely lame charity baseball match, because Peppermint Patty asks her to. She fails utterly, and I adore her for it.