Not only did I find Diana Wynne Jones' latest, House of Many Ways, on sale unexpectedly at the B. Dalton in Union Station, but I randomly ran into smillaraaq on the way back to the office! And of course we babbled about books and manga and fanfic, while the travelers milled about us.

:-D

These are mostly for smillaraaq. Somewhere deep in the guts of the Meta Thread from Heck (f-locked, I am afraid), which started out innocently as a notice of a fic posting on my other account and now exceeds 300 posts, she mentioned that she had not read much (or did not recall much) Cherryh, and as CJC is about my favorite SF writer, I felt this needed to be remedied. And when I said so, she said she'd also appreciate recs for DWJ - who is one of my favorite fantasy authors. So, without further ado ... .

I'm going to play scholarly now, like the English major I was many years ago.

I doubt I'm really going to break any new ground here, especially given that a couple of different scholarly studies of DWJ's works have been released in the past few years. I'm also guessing that this same structure might well apply to other young adult fantasy novels. Finally, I have a nagging feeling that I once read about ideas like this in something called, I think, "The Hero's Journey." But thinking this through was useful for me when I was writing my review of her recent book The Game, because it let me pinpoint where I felt that things had gone wrong.

Most of the examples that I'm going to use are from the novels I've reread most often. They are:

• Fire and Hemlock (F&H)
• The Lives of Christopher Chant (LoCC)
• Charmed Life (CL)
• The Homeward Bounders (HB)
• Archer's Goon (AG)

These books focus on a single protagonist. Although that person may have siblings or friends as sidekicks, the story is told only from his or her POV. I'm going to add a few examples from Witch Week (WW), but that one features two alternating protagonists (Nan and Charles), which makes the arguments a little less clear in some cases.

No music, because it's the middle of the night, and we have house guests (sis-in-law and nephew). And the Young Lady is off at her "Pirates of Penzance" cast party, because this was the closing night. The party runs all night, but she hasn't socialized on this level much yet, usually it's been just one-on-one with a best friend, she's an introvert like everyone else in the family (INTJ, probably) ... I'll be picking her up soon.

The Game began promisingly, introducing a young orphan named Hayley Foss who has recently left her grandparents' quiet home to join a boisterous gathering of cousins she has never met. As the story explored Hayley's strange home life and her interactions with the cousins, hints of otherwordliness gave way to full-blown fantasy, comfortingly reminscent of Diana Wynne Jones's earlier books. I quickly became engrossed and was thoroughly enjoying myself - until the story slammed shut abruptly, leaving me surprised and annoyed.

This is only half of a DWJ book. No, it doesn't end in the middle. Instead the first three-eighths are grafted directly onto the final eighth. I can't say it's not worth reading, but I was disappointed.