Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones

[rachelmanija]

Cat Chant is a quiet, passive boy whose selfish, bossy sister Gwendolyn is a witch. When they’re orphaned in a boating accident, Gwendolyn quickly arranges life to her satisfaction, getting magic lessons from locals and finally getting herself and Cat taken in by the great enchanter, Chrestomanci, an elegant man with an endless selection of exquisite outfits. To Gwendolyn’s fury, no one at Chrestomanci Castle appreciates her wonderfulness, so she sets about turning the place upside down. Cat, whose approach to life is mostly duck-and-cover, ducks and covers until suddenly he can’t any more, and is forced to take action.

That’s about all I can say about the plot without ruining the twists. (You can probably guess that there’s more to Cat than meets the eye. But you probably won’t guess the exact plot turn which forces Cat from his usual place as an onlooker into a mover and shaker.)

Diana Wynne Jones is great at hilariously animated inanimate objects, and the weakly waving gingerbread men and Julia’s cowardly tin soldiers are some of my favorites of those. The shift in Gwendolyn’s pranks from harmless and funny to disturbing and awful is mirrored in the tone of the book – one minute you’re laughing, and the next you don’t want to look over your shoulder. The careful set-up of a number of plot points gets a marvelous pay-off when Cat ends up with something like five awful fates hanging over his head, all set to occur sequentially over the course of a weekend.

But what makes this book special to me isn’t so much the comedy, though it’s very funny, or the plotting, which is very well-done, as the complicated relationship between Cat and Gwendolyn, and the emotional honesty of Cat’s slow growth from a boy who won’t or can’t understand most of what’s going on in his life, to a boy who begins to step up and take responsibility for things he’d rather not even think about, let alone deal with.

Feel free to put spoilers in comments.

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant

Comments

[yhlee]

I love this book so much, although it took me years to twig on to just how awful Gwendolyn was.

[stranger]

This was the first DWJ book I read (long, long ago), and it was my benchmark for young-magic fiction ever after. And, of course, nothing quite measured up except The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I didn't find for at least a decade. I did glom onto a batch of British imports (the only way to get the books then), at MediaWestCon of all places, including Eight Days of Luke and The Ogre Downstairs and so on. That was a good year.

[ironed_orchid]

I'm re-reading the Chrestomanci books and you're really captured what's great about Charmed Life. I love how everyone can see Gwendolyn clearly except for Cat, because he so desperately needs to think of her as better than she is.