Reading: The Pinhoe Egg

[white_hart]

After a run of books I didn't enjoy very much, I wanted to read something I knew I would love, and I knew I couldn't go wrong with an old favourite like Diana Wynne Jones. (I haven't exactly been rationing the books I hadn't read at the time of her death, or indeed the ones I hadn't read for 30 years, but I have been trying to space them out, and they're often the ones I reach for when I want something I'm guaranteed to find enjoyable and cheering.)

The Pinhoe Egg is the last of the Chrestomanci books, and unlike most of the others (with the exception of one of the stories in Mixed Magics) it's a direct sequel to the first one, Charmed Life. As this was definitely my favourite of the three I read as a child, I was pleased by this, although as is often the way with DWJ's sequels it spent as much time developing new characters (in this case Marianne Pinhoe and her family of witches, one of three families who control all magic in the area around Chrestomanci Castle, so far without any Chrestomanci becoming aware of them) as it does revisiting old ones. Like all the Chrestomanci books, it's a magical romp with some fairly dark undertones. I really enjoyed the interaction between Marianne and Cat and the way each of them learns important truths about themself as a result of knowing the other one, as well as seeing more of Chrestomanci and the world that he lives in. It's funny and charming and more serious than it looks at first glance, and I loved it; I'm only a little sad that this means that I have read all of the Chrestomanci books there ever will be, and have further reduced my stock of new-to-me DWJ novels.

Comments

[sam_t]

I think I must be a bit adrift on my dating, then, as I don't think I'm much younger than you, but I suppose a couple of years or so meant more then than they do now! I must have encountered The Lives of Christopher Chant when it was new, without knowing it was.

[white_hart]

It looks as though The Lives of Christopher Chant came out in 1988, so I would have been 14 and I suspect if I'd encountered it then I would have read it, but by that stage I wasn't looking at the "children's" sections in the library and bookshops any more (and I think it often took libraries a while to get books, anyway - I suppose it wouldn't have come out in paperback until a year or so later). That was about the time I read both Howl's Moving Castle and Fire and Hemlock, but they were both (re?)published in Methuen's "teen" imprint rather than the "children's" imprint so I found them in the YA section of a bookshop.