I don’t read much juvenile (what’s often referred to a Young Adult these days, a term which I hate – Young Adult has a perfectly good natural meaning of “recently became an adult”, i.e. 18-21 or thereabouts; the use of it to refer to teenage or juvenile is pandering to a desire to claim a misleading description by teenagers, which should not be indulged – rant over) fiction. I can’t cope with the limited vocabular and simple sentence structure in much of it. However, Diana Wynne Jones (lovely lady that she was) manages not to trigger my issue in this and its sequels. I was mostly inspired to read this by the Miyazaki movie. It’s interesting comparing how closely the movie follows the book. The movie is a fairly free adaption, and misses out on a bunch of backstory as well as introducing some other material not in the book. THe apprentice in the book is a youth rather than a child, for example. I try, though, not to judge adapations on faithfullness but rather on quality in their media and the movie is generally very good as a movie with just a couple of bits (like Sophie’s mother, step-mother in the book) which don’t proparly make sense.

The book has a more complicated structure than the movie and gives a much more complete picture of the people and the world. Not surprising, as this is common in movies made from books. It’s hard to do even a juvenile book in a 90 minute or two hour movies in all its details.

This (series, not just this book) is one of my comfort reads, alongside things like Barry Hughart’s Master Li & No. Ten Ox books. Highly recommended, even if like me you don’t generally read juveniles. In particular the author’s knowledge of and twisting of the tropes of fantasy keeps things very interesting.