Waiting on Wednesday [3]

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme that spotlights eagerly awaited upcoming releases. It's hosted by Breaking the Spine.

This week's pick: Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones


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As a boy, he had spent fascinated hours looking at the garden through each differently coloured pane. Depending, you got a rose pink sunset garden, hushed and windless; a stormy orange garden, where it was suddenly autumn; a tropical green garden, where there seemed likely to be parrots and monkeys any second. And so on. As an adult now, Andrew valued that glass even more. Magic apart, it was old old old. The glass had all sorts of internal wrinkles and trapped bubbles, and the long-dead maker had somehow managed to make the colours both intense and misty at once."


When the magician Jocelyn Brandon Hope died he bequeathed Melstone House to his grandson Andrew. He also left his ‘field of care’: an area of strangeness surrounding the land around the house, whose boundary Andrew must walk in order to preserve its power.

Andrew had always loved the house, but he finds owning it a lot more complicated, aside from all the magic. There is Mrs Stock, the tyrannical housekeeper who won’t let him move the furniture and punishes him with her terrible cooking. Just as bad is the obsessive gardener who will only grow giant inedible vegetables. To add to his troubles, twelve year old orphan Aidan Cain suddenly arrives on the doorstep begging protection from magical stalkers, and Andrew’s sinister rich neighbour, Mr Brown, begins to encroach on the ‘field of care’. The one compensation is the gardener’s beautiful niece, Stashe. Things become stranger and stranger until all is made clear with the help of the enchanted glass itself.

Not since HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE has Diana Wynne Jones combined romance and humour so successfully as in this delightful novel with echoes of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.


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Please allow me to participate in some craaaazy fangirl squealing:

zOMG. DWJ IS COMING OUT WITH A NEW BOOK. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK! DWJ= GODDESS OF CHILDREN'S FANTASY. SHE IS ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC AND THE BEST WRITER EVER. NEW BOOK SHINY NEW BOOK. GIANT INEDIBLE VEGETABLES (???!!!) I WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT NOW!!!!!11111111 EEEEK!

Ahem.

I WILL DO ANYTHING TO GET MY HANDS ON THIS BOOK. SERIOUSLY.

Ahem.

Diana Wynne Jones is my favorite author. Words can not even describe how much I love her books (be ready for some of her books on Friday Favorites!). If I was only allowed to read one author for the rest of my life, it would be Diana Wynne Jones. She is just the best, just the absolute best if you want to read fantasy. I am the hugest fan of her work imaginable--I used to reread one of her books everyday.

So you can imagine how ecstatic, pleased, happy, excited, hyperventilatingly overjoyed I feel right now, even thinking about this new release.

Definitely my #1 read I'm looking forward to in 2010.

DWJ IS AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME! SHE IS THE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! SO THIS BOOK IS GOING TO BE THE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED CHEESE!

Please nod intelligently,while I sweep out of this blog like a very long procession of one person.

Release Date: April 6, 2010

That's only half a year from now! *begins counting seconds*