Book: Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones


Cute, but better if it had been a trifle shorter

Diana Wynne Jones
Howl's Moving Castle
HarperCollins, 1986
ISBN: 0-06-441034-X
$6.99
329 pages

Howl's Moving Castle is a fantasy novel with a plot straight out of a Shakespeare comedy. We have three eligible sisters who are forced to seek their fortunes apart, a good witch and a bad one, disguises, spells that affect the wrong person, people's intentions misinterpreted, and so on. With a plot that's so obviously like that, there are really only two questions: Will the story remain interesting through the confusion and misunderstandings that make up the middle? and Will the happy resolution be satisfying?

The ending gave me a smile or two, but I confess that I got a trifle impatient in the middle. One fewer bit of confusion would have been just fine by me.

I'll be interested to see the movie that Hayao Miyazaki has just finished making of it. I think that Miyazaki is a stone genius, but I also think that his other moving-castle movie, Laputa: Castle in the Sky is his weakest.

Posted: Sun - September 5, 2004 at 06:52   Main   Category: 

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