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Jones, Diana Wynne - The Merlin Conspiracy
This is set in the same universe as Deep Secret, though you don't need to read one to read the other.
Roddy, a member of the Royal Progress of the Isle of Blest (sort of like a royal court on a bus), ends up discovering that there's a giant conspiracy in place involving the Merlin, who's supposed to keep the magic of Blest balanced. Nick Mallory from Deep Secret manages to wander off into a parallel world, gets himself into all sorts of trouble, and generally gets tangled up in Roddy's business. Roddy manages to collect several extremely annoying relatives, while Nick manages to encounter an extremely polite elephant, a powerful magician, and a goat.
The plot doesn't feel like a plot that moves forward; instead, Jones takes assorted incidents that seem random and ties them all together in the end. Sometimes I enjoy it when she does this. This time, I felt like I wasn't interested in the book until halfway through, when things were finally starting to coalesce a bit. Jones includes her trademark horrible relatives;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeandink mentions that there are several cases in which children manipulate people, and the adults are sometimes just as bad.
I'm not quite sure what to say about this one. I liked the elephant and Nick and Roddy finally meeting, but something felt missing. I was never quite interested in Nick or Roddy's plight, and I never felt as though the world was threatened, even though there are supposed to be universally horribly consequences to the scheme that Roddy discovers.
Links:
-coffeeandink's review
ETA: some spoilers in the comments
Roddy, a member of the Royal Progress of the Isle of Blest (sort of like a royal court on a bus), ends up discovering that there's a giant conspiracy in place involving the Merlin, who's supposed to keep the magic of Blest balanced. Nick Mallory from Deep Secret manages to wander off into a parallel world, gets himself into all sorts of trouble, and generally gets tangled up in Roddy's business. Roddy manages to collect several extremely annoying relatives, while Nick manages to encounter an extremely polite elephant, a powerful magician, and a goat.
The plot doesn't feel like a plot that moves forward; instead, Jones takes assorted incidents that seem random and ties them all together in the end. Sometimes I enjoy it when she does this. This time, I felt like I wasn't interested in the book until halfway through, when things were finally starting to coalesce a bit. Jones includes her trademark horrible relatives;
coffeeandink mentions that there are several cases in which children manipulate people, and the adults are sometimes just as bad. I'm not quite sure what to say about this one. I liked the elephant and Nick and Roddy finally meeting, but something felt missing. I was never quite interested in Nick or Roddy's plight, and I never felt as though the world was threatened, even though there are supposed to be universally horribly consequences to the scheme that Roddy discovers.
Links:
-
coffeeandink's reviewETA: some spoilers in the comments
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I've pretty much given up on it by now.
There is no author whose books I run so unpredictably hot and cold on like Diana Wynne Jones.
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Yeah, sometimes DWJ completely fails to work for me, and sometimes I love her books to pieces, depending. Though this seems to have been a fairly meh book for many.
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Though I sympathized greatly with Nick in the morning. i hope i am not that bad
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I quite liked this one in parts, but the "assorted incidents that feel random" comment is, sadly, bang on. I have a feeling that part of my relatively positive reaction is that I do like both Nick and Roddy. The whole Loggia City segment left me cold, though, and Romanov felt like a less pleasant version of Konstam from Homeward Bounders. It bothered me, too, that some interesting ideas were just dropped cold in a couple of places (Nick's spirit guide animal, for example), and other interesting ideas seemed to have been stuck in there just to see how they flew, whether or not they made sense to the story as a whole (like the flower-classification system for the spells Roddy picked up).
I did find the climactic scene pretty involving, but the whole thing does just sort of fizzle out at the end. DWJ always seems to have trouble with endings - Archer's Goon is the only one I can recall just now that ends in a satisfying way for me - and the problem just seems to get worse and worse.
I have her newest, The Game, but I'll want to re-read it at least once before I say anything about it.
- Cho
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Ooooo, you have the latest! I'm still a couple of books behind and waiting for Pinhoe Egg.
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(FWIW - review of The Game now posted)
- Cho
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But then I may be the only person who liked 'The Lives of Christopher Chant' better than 'A Charmed Life'. Of course most of that is me preferring Christopher (and the Goddess! I can't overstate the awesomeness of Millie) to Cat.
Diana Wynne Jones has a lot of dysfunctional families and bad parents in her books. Especially bad mothers, possibly because of her difficult relationship with her own mother.
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I read Dogsbody a few years ago, before I started blogging, and it's one of my favorite DWJs, along with Fire and Hemlock and Homeward Bounders and some of the Chrestomanci ones. And Howl's Moving Castle. Hee ^_^.
I wish I had found DWJ while growing up!
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