House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones

Books for younger readers come in a near-infinite variety of age bands and formats, from plastic-coated books that shed the drool of infants up to the kind of novels that are marked "16+" and snatched up by thirteen-year-olds everywhere. But, once you get up into real novels, with the length and vocabulary of those for adults, there's only two kinds of books: those that tell kids that the world is just as bad as they're sure it is, and those that tell them that the world is just as wonderful as they hope it is.

Flora's Dare, which I recently read, is an example of the first kind -- there's real danger, and the definite possibility of death for the young protagonist. The world is not fair, it's not kind, and stupid mistakes can be just as fatal as in our own world. (The Harry Potter books are another example of this, as are most of the stories in which teens feel put upon and downtrodden.)

House of Many Ways, on the other hand, is of the other persuasion: what danger that lurks in these pages is slight and easily dealt with, as the focus is on growing up into a trusted place in a loving world, with useful work lined up for the heroine and the bulk of the book given up to scenes of marvelous domesticity. Both kids of books can be equally as much fun to read, though one must admit that the first type -- which conforms more closely to the jaundiced view of the world held by most adults -- is usually given the edge as more realistic and true to life.

But let's leave that all aside for now, and travel back to the world of Jones's novel Howl's Moving Castle. It's now a half-generation later; Sophie and Howl have been married for some time, and have an toddler son, Morgan. But this book focuses on another girl, Charmain Baker, who's sent to housesit for her Great-Uncle William (the Royal Wizard of Great Norland), while he goes off to be cured of his serious but unspecified illness by the elves. She's thrilled to be getting out from under the thumb of her conventionality-loving mother -- the kind of pseudo-antagonist that shows up in books like these, usually in more virulent form than here, to deplore anything interesting, resourceful, or intelligent that a heroine wants to do as "unladylike" -- and expects to spend her time just sitting and reading as much as possible.

She does have to do a bit more than that, but she's not given a lot of work; the wizard's house runs itself most of the time, down to providing meals when given the proper orders. The dirty dishes and laundry, though, have been piling up in the kitchen in advance of her arrival...but Charmain, left to her own devices, would probably have never touched them. But then Peter Regis arrives -- he's the son of the Witch of Montalbino, and he's supposed to become William's apprentice -- and Charmain isn't allowed to loaf around quite so much as she might like.

She also runs into a lubbock -- a very nasty intelligent magical creature that plants its parasitic young in humans -- when an exploration of the house leads out a window high in the nearby mountains.

And, most importantly, the King of Great Norland -- who affects not an iota of pomp, as often happens in YA novels that tend to the wonderful -- replies to her note, saying that he'd love to have her help catalog the royal library. At the castle, she meets Sophie, Calcifer the fire demon, and, eventually, Howl, who is in a different form for most of the book for a reason that I must have skimmed over.

So Charmain is away from home, doing pretty much just what she pleases, and hobnobbing with a very friendly king. Along the way, she does have to save the kingdom, but that plot stays at the level of background details until the last couple of chapters, when the big threat to the kingdom and the danger of the lubbock is dealt with very quickly. House of Many Ways is a cozy fantasy novel, one without much danger, where the pleasure are imagining how much fun it would be to be in Charmain's place and in re-meeting old friends from Howl's Moving Castle. In my experience, Jones generally has more of a plot than this, and usually more tension and consequences. House of Many Ways is a big cream puff of a book; it's sweet and pleasant while you're reading it, but it doesn't linger long, and the reader wants a more substantial YA novel almost immediately afterward.

(Luckily, I had one: Adam Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday.)