Diana Wynne Jones (born August 16 , 1934 ) is an English author notable for her fantasy novels for children. Sourced Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people’s lives. Nice people behave like wicked...
Contemporary children's fantasy has its own conventions and standards, often unacknowledged but recognized by those who write or publish fantasy. Diana Wynne Jones has built her reputation on challenging those conventions, standing them on their heads,...
Diana Wynne Jones "is a prolific novelist of enormous range who can raise hairs on the back of the neck one minute, belly laughs the next," asserts Elaine Moss in the Times Literary Supplement. Jones not only creates mythical worlds peopled with...
Diana Wynne Jones (born London August 16, 1934) is a British writer, principally of fantasy novels for children and adults, as well as a small amount of non-fiction. Some of her better-known works include the Chrestomanci series and the novels Howl's...
Every day when he got to work, Jose Padro would call his wife, Diana, at her office in the Pentagon, just to hear her laugh. It wasn't a nervous giggle or an earsplitting chortle, he explained. "It was a kind of laugh like,...
AS THE FIRST anniversary of Princess Diana's death is commemorated, the British public seems to be reacting with what once, pre-Diana, was considered its customary reserve. The Gallup polling organization asked 1,009 Brits whether they planned any special observance of the occasion today; only...
What a brilliant and talented writer this is! [In The Magicians of Caprona Diana Wynne Jones] breaks all the usual rules of fantasy with impunity, secure in her own virtuosity. We are in Italy. Caprona is a Renaissance City State, ruled by its Duke and threatened by enemies with familiar names like Siena and Florence. But how strange; while some people travel by coach others have motor cars. It appears that we are not in a conventional Italy after all but in one parallel to our world, in a world where magic...
By now we can trust Diana Wynne Jones to sustain daylight magic with aplomb, humour and total logic. Like The Ogre downstairs, her new story, Eight days of Luke, is based on the intrusion of mythological figures into a tense, confused family situation. David suffers from a plethora of unprepossessing and unfeeling relatives—a great-aunt and great-uncle, their son and daughter-in-law, who, after grudgingly offering him a home, ignore him as far as they can. At the beginning of the summer holidays, whe...
The ogre downstairs will be wasted if it is not accorded the widest possible readership—not that young readers won't ap-preciate it but their elders should not miss it either. Like E. Nesbit, Diana Wynne Jones uses magical events as a way of revealing character; by the way people react to extraordinary happenings you see what they are like and how they change. Here are two families faced with the need to unite and fiercely resenting it. When Mrs. Brent married Jack Macintyre, her children ...