"Howl's Moving Castle" by Diana Wynne Jones

 

 

I don't actually have a good opening sentence for this post, so now it's this sentence. Oh well. 

 

That aside, Howl's Moving Castle is a really good book. It's about a girl, Sophie Hatter, who's the eldest of three daughters (in the land of Ingary  cool name  where fairy tale tropes are true, and so the eldest is doomed to fail if she goes out to seek her fortune). Aaaaaaaaand then she gets turned into an old lady by the Witch of the Waste. I wasn't expecting that the first time I read it, and it was still a bit of a shock the second time even though I knew it was coming.

Sophie decides "you know what, even though this mysterious Wizard Howl is rumored to eat babies/steal girls' souls/have a jar of hearts lying around, I'm an old lady anyway, YOLO" and goes walking up to the titular Moving Castle. She then threatens it with her stick until the Wizard Howl's apprentice Michael lets her in. 

When I first picked up the book House of Many Ways and mentioned that it was the sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, my mom said that she'd heard Howl's Moving Castle was a Beauty and the Beast retelling. I read it with that in mind this time around, and...

There is a guy named Gaston, but he doesn't really do Gaston stuff. Beauty (Sophie Hatter) is a normal Beauty-aged girl turned into an old lady, and the Beast (Wizard Howl) is |basically a dissolute teenager, but a dissolute 27-year-old instead|. So... maybe? I could see it as a BATB retelling, but it also stands up on its own. On the other hand, it's got an Evil Stepmother(tm)... who isn't evil, but still.

 

I really liked the magic system. It's more like taken-seriously fairytale magic than videogame, D&D, or LOTR magic, and if you do the "fairytale magic taken seriously" thing right, it outstrips the first two and is as good as the third.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T. Fantasy violence, redacted swearing (as in, "followed by a hurriedly bitten-off swear word" and suchlike), creepy turnip-headed scarecrows. If done right, a Howl's Moving Castle videogame could be good, but the narrative isn't really one that would adapt well to videogame format. The best type of game for it would probably be visual novel. (I wonder why...)

I'm rating this book four stars. 

Favorite lines:

 

  The biggest jar had a name. It was called DRYING POWER in crooked letters. Sophie was not sure whether there should be a D in that or not.

  Page 67.

  Howl shrugged. "What an outspoken old woman you are! I've reached that stage in my career where I need to impress everyone with my power and wickedness. I can't have the King thinking well of me."

  Page 77.

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