Title: Witch Week, The Lives of Christopher Chant
Author: Diana Wynne Jones
(C)1982, 1988
Publisher: Beech Tree Books (an imprint of William Morrow & Co.)
ISBN: 0-688-15545-6, 0-688-16365-3
211 pp., 230 pp.
There are two more books after these, but this was the end of her original quartet. There's quite a gap between the copyrights here, and even more between the first and the last book, but she does an excellent job keeping the characters and the worlds as if she had written one right after the other. It's a difficult thing to do...trust me.
Witch Week is a world exactly like our own, or at least exactly like the one Janet came from which is supposed to be like ours, except that people develop into witches there.
Oh! Did I not tell you about Janet? I suppose I haven't. She appears back in Charmed Life. Cat's sister, Gwendolyn escapes the castle by going into another of the worlds. When she moved, so did all of her doubles in the other worlds. Janet, being one of the doubles, moved too and ended up with Cat. Janet is much more pleasant than Gwendolyn ever was.
But getting back to Witch Week...That world is full of magic and witches, but it's illegal. So if you're caught, they burn you. It takes place at a school full of witch-orphans and troubled children. When a note shows up that states someone in class is a witch, things start to happen. Chrestomanci is summoned towards the end (the children think the name is a spell and are quite surprised when he shows up) and find a way of bringing the world back into the one Janet is from, since it never should have split off in the first place.
The Lives of Christopher Chant is my favorite book out of the four. Christopher is the Chrestomanci we've been reading about in the other three. It takes us back before he was Chrestomanci; before he even realized he was doing magic.
She shows us how and why silver stops his magic. We watch as Christopher looses life after life at an alarming rate. We meet Millie as a young girl. She turns out to be from a different world completely. And we get a chance to look at the castle from a slightly different perspective. I say slightly different since Christopher has much the same feelings about the place as Cat and Gwendolyn do later.
I loved the way she described all the different worlds. It makes you realize how many more books she could write using Chrestomanci's world as a jumping off point. The ending surprised me. I had predicted Uncle Ralph's character about half way through, but it was was happened in Eleven with Gabriel that I wasn't expecting, though I probably should have seen it coming.
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci are great books. These four are bound up into a two volume omnibus for anyone who prefers to have less books sitting on the shelf. Don't ask me why, but I find those harder to read. I'll be reading The Pinhoe Egg next and probably have it done this weekend. It's the last Chrestomanci book I have on the shelf. I'm looking forward to meeting Cat again and see how he's grown.
Until next time...Happy Readings!
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