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truepennyI've been trying to figure out which DWJ book is my favorite, and I've come to the stunningly lame conclusion that I can't.
Partly this is because I started reading her when I was eight, so that I've gone through a number of different favorites. The Magicians of Caprona was the #1 first, then Witch Week, then A Tale of Time City, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. So I'm going to fall back on the ones that have worn the best, in which I keep finding more when I reread. (Witch Week is out of the running, because, as I said, I can't reread it any more.)
Fire and Hemlock, because it does so many extraordinarily difficult things so extraordinarily beautifully. It's a love story, and a bildungsroman, and a meditation on memory and loss and real love (not, please note, the same as Twue Wuv, but the kind of love that HURTS and splinters inside your heart and makes you not able to say anything to the one person in the world you most want to talk to), and a reworking of "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," and it explains so clearly just why and how teenage girls are so fucking stupid sometimes.
Power of Three: I have a big big weakness for boys who angst, and Gair angsts with the best of them. But also, this book is deceptive. I didn't much like it when I was a child, but rereading it as an adult, I found so much grace and pain, so much thought about why people can't stop hating each other, even when they want to.
Archer's Goon: Funny. I love her manic, labyrinthine plots, and this is one of my favorites. Also a favorite for the family dynamic of Howard, Awful, Quentin, and Catriona (which, to respond to something![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melymbrosia said in her reply to my previous post, is one of the few non-horrid families in DWJ. The Sykeses are just ... weird.). And the endless free-wheeling inventiveness--the first time I read it, I ended up with this huge goofy grin on my face that I couldn't have explained if anybody had asked.
Charmed Life, because, duh. Chrestomanci. Also the alternate history thing, and that favorite theme of hers that nobody is quite what or who they seem. And it's just such a damn good piece of children's literature.
The Homeward Bounders and Howl's Moving Castle, both of which have bits that I really just don't like, but which overall I'm extremely fond of. Social embarrassment isn't funny for me. It just isn't. It's squicky and makes me cringe. I can't even quite laugh at Basil Fawlty (the incomparable John Cleese) staging a faint to avoid introducing two people whose names he's simultaneously forgotten. So The Homeward Bounders tends to bother me. And Howl's Moving Castle always makes me weirdly anxious. I can't explain it; Sophie being changed into an old lady--although yes, funny, and yes, brilliant, and all the rest of it--just distresses me.
I also love Hexwood and Deep Secret, but they just aren't her best books. No matter how shamelessly I have a mad slavering crush on Rupert Venables, DS is still a patchy, uneven book. Although, truly, the large sections where she's on her game more than make up for the less-so bits.
I was about to apologize for going on at such insane and tedious length when I remembered that this is MY journal and I can babble as much as I want. Ha.
Partly this is because I started reading her when I was eight, so that I've gone through a number of different favorites. The Magicians of Caprona was the #1 first, then Witch Week, then A Tale of Time City, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. So I'm going to fall back on the ones that have worn the best, in which I keep finding more when I reread. (Witch Week is out of the running, because, as I said, I can't reread it any more.)
Fire and Hemlock, because it does so many extraordinarily difficult things so extraordinarily beautifully. It's a love story, and a bildungsroman, and a meditation on memory and loss and real love (not, please note, the same as Twue Wuv, but the kind of love that HURTS and splinters inside your heart and makes you not able to say anything to the one person in the world you most want to talk to), and a reworking of "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," and it explains so clearly just why and how teenage girls are so fucking stupid sometimes.
Power of Three: I have a big big weakness for boys who angst, and Gair angsts with the best of them. But also, this book is deceptive. I didn't much like it when I was a child, but rereading it as an adult, I found so much grace and pain, so much thought about why people can't stop hating each other, even when they want to.
Archer's Goon: Funny. I love her manic, labyrinthine plots, and this is one of my favorites. Also a favorite for the family dynamic of Howard, Awful, Quentin, and Catriona (which, to respond to something
melymbrosia said in her reply to my previous post, is one of the few non-horrid families in DWJ. The Sykeses are just ... weird.). And the endless free-wheeling inventiveness--the first time I read it, I ended up with this huge goofy grin on my face that I couldn't have explained if anybody had asked.Charmed Life, because, duh. Chrestomanci. Also the alternate history thing, and that favorite theme of hers that nobody is quite what or who they seem. And it's just such a damn good piece of children's literature.
The Homeward Bounders and Howl's Moving Castle, both of which have bits that I really just don't like, but which overall I'm extremely fond of. Social embarrassment isn't funny for me. It just isn't. It's squicky and makes me cringe. I can't even quite laugh at Basil Fawlty (the incomparable John Cleese) staging a faint to avoid introducing two people whose names he's simultaneously forgotten. So The Homeward Bounders tends to bother me. And Howl's Moving Castle always makes me weirdly anxious. I can't explain it; Sophie being changed into an old lady--although yes, funny, and yes, brilliant, and all the rest of it--just distresses me.
I also love Hexwood and Deep Secret, but they just aren't her best books. No matter how shamelessly I have a mad slavering crush on Rupert Venables, DS is still a patchy, uneven book. Although, truly, the large sections where she's on her game more than make up for the less-so bits.
I was about to apologize for going on at such insane and tedious length when I remembered that this is MY journal and I can babble as much as I want. Ha.
