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Title: Witch Week
Series: Chrestomanci #3
Author: Diana Jones
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Middlegrade Fantasy
Pages: 185
Words: 73K
I have heard the question “Why isn’t DWJ as famous as JK Rowlings” punted about over the years. It might seem like a legitimate question, but I think this book answers it quite aptly.
Namely, this was a scary book for kids about bullies, meanness and very unlikeable people. None of the beautiful people are nice, none of the adults (except Chrestomanci, when he shows up for the last 10%) are decent and even the main characters are some really nasty pieces of work. Some of this might be VERY true to life and some kids might be able to identify with it all, but that’s not the goal. It’s not enough to just identify with a character, but to have characters that your readers want to emulate to be better people. This is DWJ’s failure in this book.
Until Chrestomanci shows up and begins setting things aright, I was questioning why DWJ even bothered to write this and why I was continuing to read this. While I know intellectually this so called “Chrestomanci Series” really isn’t, I do wish that that DWJ had made more of an effort to weave him into the overall story instead of making him such a small part. It’s as lame as calling Jubilee from the X-Men a real superhero (she can throw sparkles or something from her hands, whooooo).
I guess I will have to change my expectations for the rest of the series but if I come across any more that are as unlikeable as this, I’ll just stop this series and start in on my next middle grade read, the Westmark trilogy by Lloyd Alexander.
★★✬☆☆
From Wikipedia:
Click to View Synopsis
Witch Week is set in an alternative modern-day Great Britain, identical to our world except for the presence of witchcraft. Despite witches being common, witchcraft is illegal and punishable by death by burning, policed by a modern-day Inquisition.
At Larwood House, a boarding school where many of the children of executed witches are sent, a note claiming “Someone in this class is a witch” is found by a teacher. This launches an internal investigation of the more unpopular students at the school (Nan Pilgrim and Charles Morgan), who are gradually coming to terms with the fact that they are witches. Mayhem gradually ensues as magic is used to make birds appear in the classroom, to rain shoes, to curse a classmate into having his words always be true, and other pranks. When the magic gets totally out of control, one of the students runs away, leaving notes that blame the witch for controlling him. The headmistress of the school calls in an Inquisitor to find the missing student and locate the source of the trouble.
Four more of the students flee the school and two seek help from an “underground railroad” system that is known to save witches by sending them to a world where they are not persecuted. Instead they are given a spell to summon unknown help and all five students converge where they are able to use it, summoning the enchanter Chrestomanci. He and the children conclude that their world diverged from 12B (ours) by a particular historical accident. They work to outwit the local inquisition and to merge their history, thus their world, with ours. It turns out that most of the schoolchildren are witches and all must lose any such powers by revising history in that way.
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