Favorie Text

Howl's Moving Castle by Diane Wynn Jones is one of my favorite fairytale books. It fits into the fantasy genre as it is all about wizards, kings, and magic spells. This book also has an element of comedy because it begins as a spoof on the laws of fairytales. One of the laws of fairy tales is that the eldest of three siblings will never find her fortune because it is always the youngest that will have a successful and charmed life. However this story fights against the nature of fairytales. It balances between convention and invention, by having predictable things like witches, wizards, castles, and demons, but also is inventive by having castles that walk, a wizard who plays computer games, and a girl who has cursed herself to be an old woman. It is a surprising sort of book, but nothing that wouldn't be acceptable in the fantasy genre.