Forty days!

Following on the heels of yesterday's review: more excerpt! An additional scene apiece from Eliza and Dead Rick; you can pick up there, or go back and start at the beginning.

There will be one more set of scenes posted here before the book hits the shelves, plus a couple of other tidbits. Enjoy!

The DWJ Project: Witch Week

The back cover of my copy of Witch Week calls it "a wild comic fantasy from a master of the supernatural."

Um.

There are certainly funny bits in this book. (The mop-and-hoe incident comes to mind.) But "wild comic fantasy"? On a micro scale, Larwood House manages to hit almost every abusive-boarding-school trope there is: never warm enough, dreary food, teachers ranging from neglectful to cruel, and all the student-level nastiness you would expect. On a macro scale, the world is one where witches are still burned at the stake, and since half the students at Larwood are witch-orphans, that means half the characters live in fear of the inquisitors coming after them. You know how I've been talking about the way Diana Wynne Jones' books contain these hard edges, but buried in a way that lets you deal with them on your own terms? The hard edges here are scarcely buried at all. I think Witch Week is a very good book, but I almost never re-read it, because I can't lose sight of how grim it is.

Which is not to say it's unrelentingly bleak; it isn't. (I don't want to scare off anybody who hasn't read it already.) But you may spend a goodly chunk of the time outraged, before the narrative gets to the point where it says "you know how this world is really messed-up and wrong? Yeah. That isn't an accident; it's the real conflict underlying everything else."

Onward to the spoilers.

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Two more Chrestomanci books to go, and one collection.