In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Dogsbody, Cart and Cwidder, and The Power of Three!
Of these, I think my favorite is The Power of Three, a standalone fantasy with a thought-provoking premise and some believably messed up family and friendship dynamics.
Dogsbody (1975)
In Dogsbody, the personified Dog Star is reborn into a literal dog’s body and forms a strong bond with a young girl who is used by her unfeeling aunt as a sort of dogsbody. I know a lot of people who love this book, but it was a slog for me. A child is treated unrelentingly poorly and intentional physical harm is done to pets, sometimes by characters we are supposed to like. Also, I am realizing about myself that with the exception of Bunnicula, I don’t tend to seek out books where our point-of-view character is the family pet.
That said, Dogsbody is a book of its time in a really interesting way, since the Irish Troubles are an important context for the earthly plot.
Cart and Cwidder (1975)
I wrote about Cart and Cwidder a tiny bit for WWAC in 2018! It is the first book in Diana Wynne Jones’s Dalemark Quartet, a really ambitious set of four books that each deal with different ways of life in the dysfunctional land of Dalemark. In Cart and Cwidder, a family of traveling musicians is immersed in the land’s political strife and begins to fall apart after the patriarch of the family is murdered. And there’s a magical instrument. This sounds intense, and it is. The Dalemark books have a lot of intrigue and tense scenes of children and teens working together to navigate problematic situations. I’m looking forward to rereading the rest of the quartet in the context of this readthrough – I suspect they are some of Diana Wynne Jones’s most explicitly political books.
The Power of Three (1976)
In Power of Three, a family of three siblings must work together with their people’s longstanding enemies, the water-dwelling Dorig and giants who live on the moor, to save their home from being destroyed. My illustrious editor Doris V. Sutherland points out that this may have been the inspiration for this premise!
Power of Three feels like it has a stronger “moral” or “message” than many of Diana Wynne Jones’s books. For instance, we see characters make bad choices that lead to problems later. Our protagonists (and everyone in the Moor, I guess) have a rough time specifically because of bad actions and or secret-keeping done by specific people in the previous generation.
Even so, Power of Three is a romp. Just like in Witch’s Business, we get to follow these siblings around their turf as they slowly uncover what the hell has been going on there by talking to all kinds of people. I continue to think of this as a kind of noir, and I look forward to noticing it more in future books in the readthrough as well.
If you’d like to read along with me, my schedule is here! Charmed Life, Drowned Ammet, and The Spellcoats are up next.
Custom images for this series are by Marnanel Thurman.
