Archer’s Goon

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Jones started writing during the mid-1960s "mostly to keep my sanity", when the youngest of her three children was about two years old and the family lived in a house owned by an Oxford college. And it’s urgent: the siblings have laid siege to No 10 Upper Park Road with music torture and continuous road excavations in an attempt to convince Quentin to yield up his 2000 words. And this might be a kids' book (my library put it under Juvenile), but I didn't feel like she was dumbing anything down. This was the first of Dianna Wynne Jones' books that I ever read, and I went on from there to read and reread them all, or at least all of the ones on the library shelf.

As Howard unravels the truth, he uncovers that their town is run by seven megalomaniac wizards, each desperate to rule the world – and each convinced that his father’s words are the key… Can Howard find a way to stop the wizards before they wreak chaos? As children, Diana and her two sisters were deprived of a good, steady supply of books by a father, ‘who could beat Scrooge in a meanness contest’. Howard eventually realizes that he himself is Venturus, who has been building a fantastic spaceship inside his home in the future. Creative subjects, in the form of literature, music and the arts vie with science and technology, to the ultimate detriment of the latter, in philosophical terms at least. Beside the children, she felt harried by the crises of adults in the household: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a friend with daughter.Awful isn’t the only thing that I found I liked better on this reread – I seem to have forgotten the list of things the book set out to prove, and did (except perhaps “pigs have wings, making them hard to catch” – or have I missed out on that part? After attending the Friends School Saffron Walden, she studied English at St Anne's College in Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C. The thing that I seem to have glossed over when I was younger that made me uncomfortable now, though, is the depiction of Shine’s fatness as some kind of grotesque thing, which I only felt (slightly) better about because Dillian is described as plump AND glamorous.

Those early stories—and much of her future work—were inspired by a limited but crucial foundation of classics: Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, The Arabian Nights, and Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages. Though, considering the state of the town, which isn't too bad at all, you can't really say that if the family had taken over the world it would have really been such a terrible thing. As always with Dwj, this story has a deft sense of humour, a gripping storyline, an internal logic that makes sense, and something to say about family dynamics which is gradually unveiled through the book.Diana Wynne Jones spent her childhood in Essex and has been writing fantasy novels for children since 1973. There are some solid twists too, including people who turn out to be either friendlier or crueler (and in one notable case, both) than they've initially appeared. Diana was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (née Jackson) and Richard Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers.

Of them all, it's Howard whose character is the least well developed (or interesting) and it turns out that even that has a reason. Archer’s Goon is about families, their dysfunction and what brings them together and tears them apart. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

The children visit Hathaway in his Elizabethan household by going through a white door marked CURATOR at the back of the museum. Some old sellotape stuck to the boards (and some removed, with surface abrasion to boards) - 4 patches where a library dust jacket cover was attached to the boards. Old favorites come in new trimmings with the gathering together of these 16 previously published stories by Diana Wynne Jones in Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories.

When the raids of World War II reached London in 1939, the five-year-old girl and her two younger sisters were torn from their suburban life and sent to Wales to live with their grandparents. The Goon has come to demand the two thousand words of nonsense that Howard's father allegedly owes a mysterious figure named Archer.

Anyway, focusing on Awful’s actions and words and interactions with Howard made me realise that not only is she one of my favourite characters, she’s a character that stayed on in my mind – even when I didn’t quite know it – there are bits and pieces of her that I think back on every now and then, something she had said or just a thing she would have done in any particular situation.