Howl's Moving Castle - Book 10

I joined a book challenge called March Magics.  Each March apparently a group of book bloggers vote to see which fantasy novels they'll read in March.  This March, Howl's Moving Castle was one of the winners.  I'd heard about the movie from my kids who are big Hayao Miyazaki fans.  Also, I've been following on and off the book blog called Howling Frog Books for a while and I know she is a big Diana Wynne Jones fan.  So I thought I'd give Howl's Moving Castle a whirl.

This is a young adult fantasy, very clean, set in a magical world where witches and wizards abound.  Sophie is the main character.  She is the oldest of three sisters, and being the oldest means you won't be successful apparently.  Or this is an adage of this particular world (this grated on me from the beginning because forever I've been reading studies that the oldest is often the most successful in term so birth order, but never mind).  Her father dies and her step mother, Fanny, decides it is time for the girls to go off and learn a trade to support themselves.  One goes off to become a nice witch's apprentice and the other goes off to a bakery.  I got the two sisters confused a lot because they actually change places to fool everyone and I never figured out exactly who was who.  But anyway, Sophie stays behind to run the hat shoppe with Fanny.  Sophie is good at trimming hats and winds up staying in the shop all the time and becoming rather reclusive and intimidated by the world, though a bit bored.  Fanny goes out a lot and Sophie feels a little imposed upon.  In the meantime there is the moving castle that flits from place to place in the region and all the girls are frightened of it because they told that the Wizard Howl likes to capture girls and eat their hearts.

One day the Witch of the Waste comes into the shop and for some reason incomprehensible to Sophie turns her into a old woman of 90.  She's still Sophie underneath though.  Sophie wanders away from the shop and thus her adventures begin for she winds up taking refuge in Howl's moving castle. 

It wasn't a good reading week for me. This is about a 6th grade level book and should have been an easy read.  However, I always wound up reading after getting to bed a little too late and falling asleep within minutes.  The plot is just one fantastic, madcap thing happening after another and I just didn't keep track and couldn't make the connections I ought to have been making with all the characters and all the hints about what was really going on.   One of the problems might have been I read it on my Kindle.  There's this one very important spell that's like a riddle the author kept referring to throughout the book, but since I couldn't flip back to the actual spell which was like a 12 line poem, I couldn't refresh my memory on it.

R started reading the book after me but he loves fantasy and he also would listen to it on audible on the way to and from work, so he finished before me and he enjoyed it more than I did.  Tonight though we plan to watch the movie.  Maybe with R's guidance and the movie I will finally get what was going on.

This is my problem with fantasy though.  I just can't stay engaged enough in it to get all the quirky details about this whole other universe of reality.  It's bizarre to say, but fantasy actually bores me for the most part.  There are exceptions.  I loved the Half Magic books when I was little and I loved books by Zilpha Keating Snyder in junior high, which often have a magical element to them.  In adulthood I loved C. S. Lewis' Til We Have Faces.  But on the whole I just am not a Harry Potter/Tolkien person, even though I love folktales and fairy tales, but I think more for what they say about the culture and history rather than the actual magic.

So I'm a bit disappointed in myself for not seeming to be able to warm up to the fantasy genre since everyone else in my family is such a fan.  For a long time I didn't care for mysteries either but over the last decade or so I've come to really enjoy them.  So I thought maybe I'd expand into fantasy too, but nope, I just like my historical fiction and memoirs the best.  However, the March Magics challenge also includes a book by Terry Pratchett, Wee Free Men.  That author is my middle son's favorite.  He's read many of his books, so I am going to give that a try next.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.