Politics is making people sweary. It mmostly makes me feel sort of hollow and an unfortunate sort of young. Instead I stick with kid fiction. I like it when I can rewrite the ending if I wants to. Also I like it when things work out by the end.

Today I read Enchanted Glass, the new book by Diana Wynne Jones. I bought it because I remembered all the books by her that I really liked, and temporarily forgot why I was absolutely furious and sickened by House of Many Ways. (That book said that babies born the wrong color should be killed at birth. It wasn't ambiguous about it. The bad things of the story were bad because they were born that way and you could tell by their color. Very bad story. Very.) I kind of hate it when I forget why I'm annoyed with something. Often it results in being annoyed all over again. Thankfully this time not so much.

I read the book and I was quite happy with it while I was reading.. There's the usual discovering-your-power bit, and the getting to be too usual scattered-man-loves-bossy-woman story. That part got so compressed I think they'd met three times before he asked her to marry him and I don't think they actually had a conversation. She just fixed his computer and sorted out his filing system. And granted I can see how you'd want to keep that around, but really, that does not a marriage make. It had too much of the 'trophy' about it, like he wins her for remembering how to be magic. Now I've finished and I look at the plot there's a sort of sneaking dissatisfaction. I can't see where anyone makes choices that lead to the ending. They accept things other people say they should do, mostly, and so make friends, and that leads to the ending. That seems to miss some important bits. I mean it's good to make friends, but it should be...

Ah, I just realised what's missing. A lot of the characters get to be friends with the protagonists and look after them and stuff. But I don't see where the protagonists look after their friends. They do helpful things for them but it's like they feed and clothe and heal people so in return they get protected from deadly danger. It was nagging me as feeling unequal. But if it was gendered different I probably wouldn't even have noticed, except to think it was boring when a girl only feeds and clothes and heals. So there's two male protagonists in this one who win basically by being nice to people. I think I can live with that, mostly. Then the only nagging feeling is wondering if they were nice in an active way or just allowed other people to arrange things that looked nice. I think they were active and made choices that other people disagreed with, just quiet ones. Up until the end, where there was big active magic to kick bad people out.

The bad man of the story was a slim pretty posh bloke who tried to sneak in and take over when a new man was just learning how to run things. There was also a whole thing where he was trying to find and kill his own son, so he wouldn't have a replacement. Nasty.

A thing that bothered me was just tacked on the end. Because it was making perfectly good sense to have the kid protagonist be son of this man, but then it got undone, right at the end. But the offered alternative for who his father was just... messes lots of things up. It makes it so his new adoptive family is secretly his biological family after all, which is weird. But it also suggests that the theoretical good guy who died before the story starts took in a young woman with drug and alcohol problems to try and sort her out and instead got her pregnant. That's not good. That's very not good. It kind of undermines the good stuff. Plus it makes the adult protagonist guy have had a different motivation throughout, instead of just helping some kid who needed help, he's helping someone he recognised as family. That feels all wonky and wrong. I think I'm going to ignore that last chapter if I ever bother re-reading this. It's weird.


So I just put the whole plot in there so I could poke it. I think on the whole I liked it, it just felt rather thin. *shrugs*

I am a bit annoyed I bought it in hardback. I only did that cause I wasn't paying attention. I don't like it enough I'd have wanted to do that if I'd thought about it.