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: Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition. By Farah Mendlesohn. New York: Routledge, 2005. 240 pp. Farah Mendlesohn's book is the first thorough study of Diana Wynne Jones's criticism and fantasy fiction for young readers. Mendlesohn's readings are aimed at presenting...

468 pp. Greenwillow 4/03 ISBN 0-06-052318-2 16.99 g Library edition ISBN 0-06-052319-0 17.89 (Middle School, High School) Longtime children's fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones writes on an epic scale in this richly complicated tale of worlds where magic is "wide, various and...

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 ...