Armadillo’s Book Blog

We enjoyed reading Deep Secret, mostly because we became interested in Nick Mallory, who is a protagonist in another of Jones' many novels, The Merlin Conspiracy. However, it is not one of our favorite Diana Wynne Jones books.

Anyway, Nick is a nice, seemingly ordinary teenage boy with a witch (in all senses of that word) for a mother and a touching relationship with his ne'er-do-well cousin Maree. When my daughter and I first "met" him in The Merlin Conspiracy, he was looking for someone to train him to control his wizardly gifts. In Deep Secret, Nick seems not to be consciously aware that he needs training.

While not a fairy tale in the ordinary sense, Letters From Rapunzel brilliantly demonstrates the power of those ancient stories to help us understand our seemingly mundane lives.

Highly recommended for adolescents.

If you have a gifted child, particularly a girl, who is about to enter high school, or who is already in high school, and who has not already read Jerry Spinelli's amazing novel about the glory and the pain of being orders of magnitude different from one's peers, go now and read Stargirl. And then hand it to the child.

As you can tell, we here are huge fans of Diana Wynne Jones. We admire the magical worlds she creates and her characters -- human, wizard, and fantastical -- captivate us. We find the plots of her stories unpredictable but plausible, at least in the magical environments in which they take place.

I have a friend whose brilliant son graduated from college and then promptly enlisted in the military. "Maybe I won't get sent to Iraq," he told her. "Yeah, and why are they teaching you Arabic?" she asked him. There are young people who need to truly understand how terrible war can be. And maybe we should try to communicate this to them before they are old enough to sign on the dotted line of that enlistment contract.

Do I think our children ought to read books like this one? Even though they can hardly bring themselves to read on? Yes. In a country where our leaders feel comfortable cheerfully singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the melody of a Beach Boys song, our children need to read about how a downtrodden society can pull itself together and say "No" to war.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret solves this problem. A Dickensian fairy tale, told in words and beautiful, complicated charcoal drawings, Hugo Cabret tells the story of the rediscovery of a silent film director and a young boy in Paris of the early 1930s.

A lovely celebration of train stations, automata, clock mechanisms, and film.

The depictions of:

• The rocky but eventually trusting relationship between the siblings,
• The Gang of Five who are obsessed with writing a computer game,
• The dilemma of parents who are concerned that perhaps their children are possessed (most parents must believe that sometimes) and that their children's friends might not be the most upstanding citizens,
• The life of an old-fashioned gentleman who lives on a remote island in a remote community in Scotland,
• The hard work of a regional acting company, and
• The interesting character of the Boggart, who really does love his humans, even as he schemes to come up with more annoying tricks to play on them,

Note: The limitations of the personal computers that existed when this book was written play a significant part in the story. And for that reason, the fact that the author's descriptions of how computer operating systems work are a bit off deflated the story a little for me. If I were to make a movie of this book (and I think it would make a fantastic one), a slight change in a couple of the nouns would resolve this issue.

Highly recommended.

-- Emily Berk

As Tyler helped us learn in The Amateur Marriage, most decisions made by anyone, especially in his or her personal life, are going to be made amateurly, and some better than others.

Betsy Donaldson, the aging, opinionated ex-hippie, is never as gentle or tactful as her wardrobe might lead one to expect. The Yazdans, a young Iranian-American couple, find themselves intimidated by Betsy's suggestions, but prove to be just as caring with their young child as Betsy is to her's.

Tyler's descriptions of the extended communities we build to help ourselves live ours lives are touching and absolutely real.

The Last Dragon is the story of Yorsh, a young elf who is taken in by two humans when all the other elves have been exterminated by the humans of Daligar. (The elves, as everyone knows, were responsible for all evil and misfortune in the world, including the terrible rainy weather and resulting floods. After all, there must always be someone to blame.) The humans who shelter Yorsh despite the peril to their lives learn to love and appreciate his special gifts. And Yorsh comes to know that not all humans are murderers and thieves.

Worth reading, but very, very sad. May be a good way to start discussions of the Holocaust and about how people can go on with their lives, even after experiencing the awful suffering some inflict on innocents.