Power Of Three
DWJ Book Toast, #14
Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favorite fantasy authors, growing up and now, and I was saddened by the news of her death. I can't say I'm overcome with emotion - as personal as some of her work is to me, its not like I knew her after all - but I wish I could put into words how I feel about her no longer being out there, writing new adventures and laughing at all of us serious fans thinking so hard about her words when we should simply get on with the business of enjoying them.
And that's...what I'm going to do. She's left behind a huge body of work, a large amount of which I haven't read yet, so I'm going to reread all my old favorites (and hopefully some new).
An early Jones book, and a disappointingly bland one, too. I don't know how much of that must come from the fact that Jones changed and rewrote most of the rules for young fantasy stories, everything that would have made this book interesting has been appropriated and reused by other authors, and Jones herself.
First we have Gair who insists and whines over and over and over again about how Ordinary he is, and how he doesn't have special powers. He's only smart, and kind, and good at hunting, and the heir to the chiefdom of his people. His sister and brother have, respectively, the ability to know the future, and where things are, but only when asked. Most of this book would have been solved in three pages if someone had, I don't know, asked them one or two obvious questions.
Then we have the Giants and the Dorrig, a race of shape-changers, who have their own adult and youth representatives. There's a long-standing curse, and self-discoveries, and "Boy we're not so different after all" moments, but there was little of that sense of fun or insight that Jones usually bring into play.
'The Power of Three' takes a long time to build up and a lot of the elements we spend so much time on don't matter in the end. It was mostly "world-building" for the sake of world-building. I've heard good things about books that came before this one, but it seems to me that this book is definitely from a Diana Wynne Jones that is still in her apprenticeship. This is for completists only.
