(no subject)
Part of the idea in doing an Epic Diana Wynne Jones Roundup was to get a little bit of my DWJ love out of my system so I could talk about other things!
That, uh, kind of backfired, as what it mostly ended up doing was made me want to reread a whole bunch of DWJ books I hadn't read in a while. THIS WAS IN NO WAY A PREDICTABLE OUTCOME shut up. Anyway, I reread Eight Days of Luke last week, which is one of the ones I did not remember very well and which a lot of people commented to tell me I was Not Doing Justice To because I did not remember it very well. Of course they were right! Shockingly I have rediscovered that Eight Days of Luke is amazing. Here are some things I had forgotten about it that I really liked:
- how much David and Luke's friendship feels like a real friendship. They hang out together and crack each other up and have good times! You can tell that they really like each other. (I also loved the scene when they go shopping with Astrid and get bored together, because that was me SO MANY TIMES when I was a kid getting dragged around to department stores by my mom.)
- Astrid! I love that you get to see how Astrid's unpleasantness is formed by her circumstances, and how her feelings about Ronald and her life are always just kind of hinted at so you can fill in the gaps for yourself. And I like how you know that she and David are sometimes going to get screaming mad at each other, and she's going to have difficult days and he's going to have difficult days, but that's normal, not the awfulness that they've been living with.
- the idea that you can care about someone and want to help them even if they've done horrible things - that maybe it puts you technically on the 'wrong side', but that's not necessarily going to change the way you feel about them. This is an important idea to me.
- I really like DWJ's Norse mythology! I like her twisty Odin and her jovial Freys and furious Brunhilde, and how they're all genuinely scary and how she doesn't spell out exactly what's coming but you know it's on the horizon, and I love the way she dos Valhalla kind of a lot. And I really like that there's no implication that David is going to lose all connection to Luke and that world when the story's over, but rather you get the feeling that he's entwined with it all now, for better or for worse, and Luke will go on absently accidentally doing terrible things and David will go on trying to talk him out of it.
I still think David is not the most distinguishable of DWJ's boy-protagonists - but on the other hand, I like that he is not a Super Special Lonely Child and is perfectly capable of interacting normally with other kids. Also this is one of the ones where the ending kind of comes at you in a rush without giving you much time to digest it. But if you like stories where myths are interwoven into the modern world . . . like all of DWJ's takes on a trope, seriously, this is one of the best examples out there.
That, uh, kind of backfired, as what it mostly ended up doing was made me want to reread a whole bunch of DWJ books I hadn't read in a while. THIS WAS IN NO WAY A PREDICTABLE OUTCOME shut up. Anyway, I reread Eight Days of Luke last week, which is one of the ones I did not remember very well and which a lot of people commented to tell me I was Not Doing Justice To because I did not remember it very well. Of course they were right! Shockingly I have rediscovered that Eight Days of Luke is amazing. Here are some things I had forgotten about it that I really liked:
- how much David and Luke's friendship feels like a real friendship. They hang out together and crack each other up and have good times! You can tell that they really like each other. (I also loved the scene when they go shopping with Astrid and get bored together, because that was me SO MANY TIMES when I was a kid getting dragged around to department stores by my mom.)
- Astrid! I love that you get to see how Astrid's unpleasantness is formed by her circumstances, and how her feelings about Ronald and her life are always just kind of hinted at so you can fill in the gaps for yourself. And I like how you know that she and David are sometimes going to get screaming mad at each other, and she's going to have difficult days and he's going to have difficult days, but that's normal, not the awfulness that they've been living with.
- the idea that you can care about someone and want to help them even if they've done horrible things - that maybe it puts you technically on the 'wrong side', but that's not necessarily going to change the way you feel about them. This is an important idea to me.
- I really like DWJ's Norse mythology! I like her twisty Odin and her jovial Freys and furious Brunhilde, and how they're all genuinely scary and how she doesn't spell out exactly what's coming but you know it's on the horizon, and I love the way she dos Valhalla kind of a lot. And I really like that there's no implication that David is going to lose all connection to Luke and that world when the story's over, but rather you get the feeling that he's entwined with it all now, for better or for worse, and Luke will go on absently accidentally doing terrible things and David will go on trying to talk him out of it.
I still think David is not the most distinguishable of DWJ's boy-protagonists - but on the other hand, I like that he is not a Super Special Lonely Child and is perfectly capable of interacting normally with other kids. Also this is one of the ones where the ending kind of comes at you in a rush without giving you much time to digest it. But if you like stories where myths are interwoven into the modern world . . . like all of DWJ's takes on a trope, seriously, this is one of the best examples out there.