Howl's Moving Castle
by Diana Wynne Jones
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Book Summary Information
Author: Diana Wynne JonesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-22
ISBN: 0061478784
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Book Reviews of Howl's Moving Castle
Book Review: "You can find out what it is if you watch and listen carefully...."
Summary: 5 Stars
Howl's Moving Castle is a brilliant book, well on its way to becoming a classic. With its spare language and dense content it's like a poem. With its suggestions, hints, and wickedly unreliable narrator, it's like a puzzle. With its allusions both overt and subtle, it's a gateway book: Jones sends the reader out of the story world to visit or re-visit everything from Donne, Shakespeare, and Austen to folklore, botany, and rugby songs (which, as this reader has learned, can be really, really raucous). These forays are worth the effort. You return to HMC with better understanding of bookish Sophie, vain Howl, stern but loving Mrs. Pentstemmon, and the rest.
But as Calcifer, Howl's enigmatic fire demon, suggests, you really do have to watch and listen carefully. Otherwise you might breeze right past what is really going on emotionally behind Howl's and Sophie's frantic teasing, bantering, arguing, sulking, cleaning, courting, "exploiting," slithering out, slicing suits to ribbons in fits of jealousy, and so on. Very deftly, Jones demonstrates the real pain that both characters bring to the story. Part of solving the puzzle is in realizing that Howl and Sophie each have strong defenses and idiosyncratic, often very funny, ways of dealing with feelings and drives for which they are not prepared. Howl's Moving Castle is, after all, the fairy-tale romance of a young woman who emotionally is an old woman, and a young man who emotionally is a boy.
Depending on the reader's age and perspective, it is also a clear-eyed look at marriage in all its aspects, from the mundane--washing dishes and cleaning toilets--to the mystical--both partners' dead-on capacity to heal one another's deepest psychic wounds, all the while driving each other stark raving bananas.
Highly recommended.
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