Silly books to read in the middle of the night...

Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones

This is eminently suitable to read at 3am as the story is so good it's almost a pleasure to haul your sorry ass out of bed. Moril is one of a family of travelling musicians touring Dalemark. His father is killed and his mother takes up again with an old flame, leaving him with a moony older brother, a bolshy sister, a posh teenage refugee and a magic cwidder. Fortunately they have a very sensible horse...

This is the first of the 4 Dalemark books so there are still 3 more to go, hurrah!

Eagle Strike by Anthony Horowitz

One of a series of books about teenage spy Alex Rider. Amazingly, this is really too lightweight for even the most sleep-deprived of mothers. There's just so little too it. By the time you've done 2 night time feeds it's all gone!

Sabriel by Garth Nix

This is more like it! Sabriel's dad is Abhorsen; a kind of nice necromancer who makes sure the dead rest in peace. When Sabriel is 18 and just about to leave her posh girls' school an apparition brings her father's sword and bells. This is a bad sign and means her father has somehow got stuck in Death and Sabriel sets out to rescue him. Can she get the guy, kill the baddies and save the entire planet? I think she probably can ;-)

My only problem with this book is that the evil necromancer is called Kerrigor which I'm sure is a sort of Irish butter...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Many years ago, after reading Order of the Phoenix, I swore that I was not going to give J. K. Rowling any more of my money until she learned to read over her work and delete the duff bits. Now with my brain fried by hormones and lack of sleep I was so desperate for an easy read that I went back to the Harry Potter* series.

Maybe motherhood has eroded my critical faculties, but the Half-Blood Prince feels like a return to Rowling's earlier form. For a start it is much shorter and tighter than than the previous 2 installments. And I enjoyed a new comic character, Professor Slughorn who is a bit of a slimey networker. And the whole thing is easy enough to read at 3am while feeding a baby.

The ministry of magic has finally got the message that Lord Voldemort is back and prominent wizards who opposed him are being found murdered. Meanwhile, Harry has been given a second hand potions text book full of annotations by the mysterious "half-blood Prince" which make his potions the best in the class...

Unfortunately, I now feel the need to read Deathly Hallows and I have a bad feeling about that one. The fact that it had to be made into 2 films rather than 1 makes me think it might be another unedited abortion. Ah, well. I'll have to read it and find out... 

*At the height of Harry Potter mania my sister made a game of inventing new Harry Potter titles. She was best at the game coming up with gems like "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce" and "Harry Potter and the Centre of Gravity".

RIP DWJ

This week has seen the demise of one of my favourite children's authors, Diana Wynne Jones and the world is a slightly crappier place as a result.

Shadowmancer by G. P. Taylor

Pregnancy has bought with it a reduction in brain power* and I have been reaching for the easy books. What could be easier than a kids' book? Plus it will be great practice for reading The Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business over and over again. Alas, once you are an adult, reading all but the most well-written of children's books is actually quite a chore.

Shadowmancer is a fantasy novel of the epic-battle-between-good-and-evil school. In the style of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe it even has a guest appearance from Jesus. Set in North East England in some sort of generic "olden days" (I think it is round about the 18th century as we have smugglers and long-haired men) the local vicar is a sorcerer set on taking over the world using the power of the Keruvim (a sort of golden angel statue thingy. A mcguffin, it's basically a mcguffin.). Only two local kids, Kate and Thomas, and the incredibly holy African boy Raphah stand in his way. Will they be horribly killed, or will Jesus help them out at the last minute? This is fiction, so Jesus comes through, just like he doesn't in real life. I think I read somewhere that the author of this book is a vicar, but I can't altogether trust my own brain at present, so perhaps that isn't true.

I can't say that I really enjoyed reading Shadowmancer all that much. The good characters are good through and through whilst the bad characters are utterly bad. I feel this gives the book an overly simple and unrealistic feel - but I suppose that's what you get if you insist on reading children's fiction when you're in your mid 30s. The only real character in the whole thing is the smuggler Jacob Crane who is ruthless in his pursuit of wealth but fundamentally unwilling to see a satanic priest rule the Earth. Sadly, by the end of the book, he has seen the error of his ways and become comepletely nice. Pass the sickbag!

*If you are of the female persuasion and plan to one day bear children, feel free to imagine that this will not happen to you. I know I did.