keri

I never read anything by Diana Wynne Jones when I was a kid, but I knew about her, somehow. I suppose I must have had friends on Harper's Tale MOO who referenced her stuff, since that's how I learned about a lot of media.

When I decided to be gentle to myself this autumn, after my big panic attack/breakdown, and to indulge in children's books I loved as a kid, or the ones I missed out on, I knew that I'd need to put Howl's Moving Castle into the stack. I've seen on Tumblr a few posts mentioning how clever it is, and I was intrigued.

Frankly, I love it. There's a few parts that don't work for me, but I love fairy tale land settings, and protagonists who are dislikable but still lovable, and POV characters who are flat-out wrong about their POV.

The bits that didn't work - I'm not sure I'm a fan of reverse portal fantasy element of Wales, though I do like stories where our POV is the portal-land (Sophie, not Howl). I just don't really see why Wales or what it adds to the story, which works perfectly nicely if Howl's home were another part of Ingary, or Norland, or wherever. I also wasn't very clear on the resolution of the plot. I can't point out which part lost me, or what's confusing, only that I feel there's something unsettled or unexplained still, and which I need to have explained to me. Or maybe I am disgruntled with how it seems everyone knew Old!Sophie was Young!Sophie since the very beginning, and it was all disguised so well through Sophie's pov.

But, oh, I love that Sophie embraces her old ladyness so thoroughly, grumpy and muttering and the way she goes about things impulsively, instead of logically. She's exasperating, but really so. Howl is also exasperating, never explaining anything, never pinned down - he's certaintly a slitherer-outer - but I like him a lot, too. It's fun having a male main character who is so vain and selfish, but also kind and considerate underneath. I would have been delighted if the end scenario was a friendship between the two, rather than the romance, but a romance is fine - I think I might be interested in non-porny fanfiction exploration of what their lives end up doing. (I'm told by LibraryThing that there are two sequels, but they're not exactly sequels about Howl and Sophie.)

I'm very fond of Sophie's sisters, too, and I'm sad that her stepmother got so besmirched by the teenagers. Michael is a bit of not much, I think, but I'd love to have my mind changed about his interestingness.

One fun thing is that since Howl's Moving Castle was written in 1985, it is completely uninfluenced by Harry Potter. I've noticed that books-with-magic are a lot more varied in what magic spells are like and what it can do in the before-HP days. Or maybe it's just the books I pick up.