They’re just so INTERESTING to read about! For instance, in Charmed Life Gwendolen makes all the surrounding trees uproot themselves from their regular spots and come squash themselves right next to the house. She has this way of EXCELING at the details that make up the bulk of a thing. Oh, and also the fact that Gwendolen seems to have gotten the happy ending that she would have wished for).īut anyway even though one could sense the direction in which the wind was blowing it was still SO MUCH FUN TO READ IT ALL!Īnd that brings me to what I’m beginning to think is a Diana Wynne Jones specialty. Ok, I understand that what she was doing was BAD but I’d sure have liked to understand more of where she was coming from, you know? (though Janet does make up for some of it. One could tell right from the beginning the way this would all turn out though I do so wish that Gwendolen hadn’t turned out to be such a witch! And I’m not using witch in a magical sense here! Why couldn’t DWJ have endowed Gwendolen with any redeeming characteristics? Or rather why was Gwendolen’s naked ambition portrayed as being all witchly? And again I don’t mean that in a magical way!

Or at least that’s what I felt as Charmed Life opens.Ĭharmed Life is about a boy who’s forlorn and clings to his sister, Gwendolen, even though it’s obvious that his sister could not care two hoots about him. She dispenses with descriptions for outright action. She plunges one directly into a scene with characters (metaphorically) flailing their arms around, and talking to each other, and going somewhere, and this sense of motion and activity immediately drops me into another world. The first thing that I love about a Diana Wynne Jones story is this feeling of being immediately sucked into another world as soon as I start reading.

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones