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One of Jones’s earliest novels, it has a far simpler plot than most of hers: an unhappily blended family has hijinks with a magic chemistry set. I wouldn’t put it in her top ten or even top fifteen (maybe top twenty) novels, but I have re-read it several times and it reliably cracks me up. Rather unusually for Jones, it contains sympathetic parents, including, eventually, the eponymous ogre.
They came home from school to the not quite unexpected sight of six enormous toffee-bars undulating down the stairs toward them.
This sentence both sums up the novel and demonstrates Jones’s particular sense of humor and genius for creating inherently funny situations and then combining the perfect wording with the perfect image to put me, at least, on the floor. What makes this sentence so brilliant is the combination of the image, the resignation to the oncoming catastrophe implied in “not quite unexpected,” and the word “undulating.”
The Ogre Downstairs
They came home from school to the not quite unexpected sight of six enormous toffee-bars undulating down the stairs toward them.
This sentence both sums up the novel and demonstrates Jones’s particular sense of humor and genius for creating inherently funny situations and then combining the perfect wording with the perfect image to put me, at least, on the floor. What makes this sentence so brilliant is the combination of the image, the resignation to the oncoming catastrophe implied in “not quite unexpected,” and the word “undulating.”
The Ogre Downstairs
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Eeee, the toffee bars! Lord, I love those things!
To me, the complete genius of the biologies she creates for the animated things was one of the biggest pleasures of that book. Also, the dragons' teeth soldiers, modernized, crack me the hell up.
As I got older and more parental, I found myself sympathizing with the parents more than I did at first. The Archer's Goon parents aren't so bad either, especially the mother.
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