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-Diana Wynne Jones 1934– Courtesy of Diana Wynne Jonespreciate 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...

As the fantasy genre fastens its grip on children's writing its landscapes seem to be growing more shadowy and indistinct. The detailed, concrete worlds of Tolkien and le Guin, in which topography, social, economic, religious and political structure, language, flora and fauna slowly and painstakingly given the solidity of the pavement outside the reader's front door, have given way to a sort of generalized other country with pseudo-medieval village or tribal communities, stark ranges of mounta...

[Folk-magic] is tricky to set up. In The Ogre Downstairs … Diana Wynne Jones goes to town on something far more practical: a magic chemistry set. Caspar, Johnny and Gwinny feel oppressed by their new stepbrothers and irritable stepfather: the magic experiments at once liberate them and bring them further into opposition (the stepbrothers have a magic set, too). This may not sound like anything very much, but the adventures are beautifully propelled and sustained by Mrs Wynne Jones's imaginatio...

Diana Wynne Jones, who showed her talent for exploiting the tensions that exist between adults and children to create hilarious situations in The Ogre Downstairs, has now gone one step further and woven a mythological dimension into the plot of [Eight Days of Luke]…. The book is shot through with the most delightful humour, the effect of which is both immediate and rewardingly cumulative. All the loose ends are tied up in the final chapter when it becomes clear that, in helping Luke, David has also b...

Desperately in need of money, Frank and Jess form a neighborhood revenge service [in Witch's Business, published in Britain as Wilkin's Tooth]. However, instead of paying off their debts, they become involved with Biddy Iremonger, a bona fide witch who has a vendetta going for all of mankind. With help from the local bully and his gang, the children finally destroy the witch…. Although the English setting is interesting and the confrontations with the witch properly frightening, the &#x...

["Witch's Business"] is typical of a kind of TV story style—two-dimensional, linear, endlessly this-happened-then-that-happened. Talk, events, background, acquire no reality…. There is a claim here for the actuality of evil, and I am not persuaded. However, the way in which a child's total world is conveyed is impressive: its obliviousness to adult ways and solutions. No authority but the child's own is ever recognized and adults are never appealed to, no mat...

Like Joan Aiken, [Diana Wynne Jones] has a remarkable talent for creating a time which never was yet which seems believably familiar. The fantasy [The Magicians of Caprona] is set in the imaginary duchy of Caprona, located in the vicinity of Siena, Pisa, and Florence. It has its own history and geography, fluctuating in consonance with the squabbling neighboring city-states…. The enchanter Chrestomanci, the enigmatic and fascinating personality developed in Charmed Life …, plays a less dominan...

Adroitly blended realism and fantasy, [The Ogre Downstairs] … uses the results of magic potions to further compatibility. Caspar, Gwinny, and Johnny detest their new stepfather, the Ogre, and he is indeed detestable: an impatient, self-centered bully; they dislike almost as much his two sons, Douglas and Malcolm…. Sharing troubles and the wrath of the Ogre produces more understanding, and when an angry mother decamps, all unite in an effort to improve the family situation. The Ogre's co...

[The Magicians of Caprona] is a sprightly, pleasant, ingenious book, but it is neither as strong nor as multi-layered as Charmed Life; the author seems here, as in her other recent work, to be marking time…. Neither the rivalry between the families nor the threat of defeat generate much tension. Only in the fifth chapter, when Tonino and Angelica, captives of an evil enchantress, are forced to act out a degrading Punch and Judy show for their captor's sadistic amusement, does the action rise t...