Dianna Wynne Jones, Enchanted Glass

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I liked that this one was set in modern - almost - England, and that there was no attempt to localize for the American middle school audience, so you get super British vocabulary like "roundabout" for merry-go-round and "bouncy castle" for those blow-up things at carnivals that the kids jump around inside. (Although yesterday I saw an ad for a children's birthday party magician that used the same term, so maybe that's just what they're called.)

However, I don't know if I can get over SPOILER the middle-aged man (with white hair!) proposing marriage to the recent college graduate who works for him, after previously considering same with his research assistant, thing long enough to give this a fair review. ^^


The tyrannical servants you keep on because they are fixtures even though you could do their jobs better yourself was the first thing that got on my nerves in this book. (Though whether Andrew is capable of "cooking" and not just throwing frozen pizza in the microwave is an open question.) The college professor main character is just so... affable in an assured superior way, you know? And I kept waiting for the servants to reveal their better sides and they never do. However, after a while I did find that although they were still the exact same people, their formerly annoying idiosyncrasies had become endearing. Maybe this is a British thing.

On the other hand, I was really feeling the super-competence of the younger characters. The servants are enmeshed in their small worlds - like Mrs. Stock who keeps moving the piano back to its original place in the living room, or Mr. Stock who is used to doing his own work on "company time" - while Andrew is comfortable in his slightly larger academic world, but still doesn't feel the need to actually learn how to use a computer (when he can get his cute research assistant to do it for him...) or to think about how magic works. Stache breezes in, fixes the computer and organizes ALL the files; Aidan tells Andrew something about magic he never realized before; even Shaun turns out to be good with machines.

I thought this was a great comment on the competence of the young, compared to the complacency of the old, and in contrast to all the articles about how today's youth are lazy and shiftless etc etc. But later I realized that of course, this wasn't something Dianna Wynne Jones had any intention on following up on, if it was even an intentional statement in the first place - no, she was making it all up as she went along. XD;

Another DWJ staple: love of computers, in an old-person kind of way. (There was something about a magic keyboard in the second Griffin book, and wasn't there that short story about writer and the female space captain who are able to communicate because the writer's keyboard is like the control panel of a spaceship?) You get the feeling she identifies, in some ways, with Andrew, the writer who just wants to get back to his book and not worry so much about all this magic power-play stuff.

What else. This is a very, very British book... not just the vocabulary, but the setting, the whole set up. It starts with a drawing room comedy set scene - where five or six people who all have an idea about how the household should be run are interrupting each other, until Andrew, the patriarch, shouts them all down. And it ends with a set piece at a village fair where Aiden, who is from London, is excited to see a "best vegetable" competition. (He also makes friends in a new place by playing football on the village green.)

So if you like British drawing room comedies and/or small town dramas - with magic - you'll probably like this one. On the other hand - and returning to my original SPOILER - I have to say that nothing Stache did seemed to indicate that she was interested in Andrew, you know, that way. XD; Except maybe for her cat fight with Titania, who tries to seduce him. Rowr!

So you can understand why I was disturbed when he proposed to her... and she accepted. -_- Also what was up with her working part-time at a stable and living at home, when underneath her slacker exterior lurked a very, very competent secretary and computer administer? Is this a comment on the unsatisfactory state of women's work? If you are smart, ladies, you will keep yourself eligible after university, ladies, until you can make a good match and take over a respectable household?!

This is a total tangent, and not at all related to the rest of the review, but I was very excited to see an explanation of the "learning hockey stick" in this book. This is a thing R and a friend of hers have talked about, where you put in effort and don't see any results... until suddenly, after a long time, you do. Anyway, I was amazed when R's friend immediately knew what she was talking about with this because it was an unknown concept to me - but maybe not such an unknown concept to others, haha.

I heard there's a new Temeraire book out?

Comments

Let's see if this works now...

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I actually read your review a little while ago on my friends page and meant to comment, but then forgot about going over to Dreamwidth and actually do so. Oh the shame of being lazy and forgetful. XD

Apart from the magic (I'm not too keen on anything magical or supernatural) this sounds like a read I'd enjoy, especially the Britishness. I really liked this descriprion of yours: "However, after a while I did find that although they were still the exact same people, their formerly annoying idiosyncrasies had become endearing. Maybe this is a British thing." haha, this sounds so very true to life and indeed, typically British.

On an unrelated note, I finally watched Man on Wire the other night!! It was fabulous! :D My favorite scene (apart from the beautiful shots of him on the wire) is, when he tells how people kept asking him, why he had done it and he says: "You give them something truly beautiful and all they can think of is asking WHY!" XD I LOVED that.

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Thank you for very kindly commenting on an entry that no one else had commented on XD.

You don't like supernatural stories? Is that because they're not as likely to be as good with, for instance, characterization or experimental writing, as literary novels? Or do you just prefer stories that are more grounded? *is curious*

This is a fantasy novel for young adults, but very grounded in English country life, I think. Dianna Wynne Jones always has magic in her books, but she doesn't always bother to explain how it works - in this book the focus is on the characters and the (humorous or dramatic) set pieces, and not on the made-up magical system or fantasy world building.

(Some of her other books do have worldbuilding and magical systems, though even in those books, it's secondary to the characters and set pieces. I think the main thing with Dianna Wynne Jones is that characters you didn't expect to be sympathetic, will sometimes turn out to be sympathetic - or not. XD)

:D Yay! I'm glad it was good! He seemed like such an interesting guy in the interview. Now I have to watch it...