![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Like Witch's Business/Wilkin's Tooth, I'm not sure why this book got retitled. My guess is they wanted something that might at least vaguely signal fantasy, as Aunt Maria could be any kind of book at all, but it doesn't work very well; the book makes only one use of the phrase, in the first paragraph of the book (comparing their family situation to the card game Hearts, aka Black Maria), and to a U.S. eye it otherwise calls up weird, semi-racial connotations. Or at least it does for me, because fantasy so often uses "black" to signal "evil."
Anyway, the book. It falls into the "somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long" sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones' books, but as I've said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it's still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I'm qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)
The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting -- read, waiting hand and foot on -- Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris's recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn't nice at all.
( Spoilers! )
I'd only read this book once before, and didn't have much memory of it; I enjoyed it well enough on this trip through, but don't think I'm terribly likely to revisit it. Some of that, though, in this case and others, may just be an artifact of when I read the books; I'm pretty sure I encountered this one in college, after the years when I was really forming my bond with her books. You rarely love the later ones quite as much, y'know?
A Sudden Wild Magic will likely be next.
Anyway, the book. It falls into the "somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long" sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones' books, but as I've said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it's still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I'm qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)
The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting -- read, waiting hand and foot on -- Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris's recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn't nice at all.
( Spoilers! )
I'd only read this book once before, and didn't have much memory of it; I enjoyed it well enough on this trip through, but don't think I'm terribly likely to revisit it. Some of that, though, in this case and others, may just be an artifact of when I read the books; I'm pretty sure I encountered this one in college, after the years when I was really forming my bond with her books. You rarely love the later ones quite as much, y'know?
A Sudden Wild Magic will likely be next.
