- Dirda’s Reading Room
- Come talk about books with critic Michael Dirda.
Remembering Diana Wynne Jones
Today (Monday, March 28) many readers of fantasy and children’s literature are saddened to learn of the death of Diana Wynne Jones. “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Archer’s Goon,” “Hexwood” and the Chrestomanci series are only a few of her major titles. Wynne Jones, like most fantasy writers, possessed a wonderful deadpan wit, perhaps best evidenced in “The Tough Guide to Fantasy.” This book, organized like a dictionary or small encyclopedia, offers scholarly sounding mini-essays on every cliché and convention of the fantasy author’s repertory.
I wish I were at home—I’m about to drive back to DC from a week visiting my mother in a nursing home in Ohio—so that I might quote a little from Wynne Jones’s books. I reviewed several over the years, and once chatted on the phone with the author herself, who seemed quite thrilled to learn that my then young son Nate loved her work. One would have to go back to Joan Aiken to find a similarly witty and original writer for young people. Sigh. Perhaps others in the Reading Room are fans and will share a favorite passage or two from Wynne Jones or recommend a favorite book.
- Michael Dirda
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