Diana Wynne Jones

I've just started reading Diana Wynne Jones's The Magicians of Caprona.  And it's quite delightful.  In my expert opinion (ha, ha--I just love saying that), Jones is possibly the most underrated contempporary writer of juvenile and YA fiction.  I have not read anything by her that I haven't liked.  I think that Charmed Life, which I reread over the Thanksgiving holiday, is maybe my favorite.  Especially in her Chrestomanci collection, of which both Charmed Life and Caprona are a part, Jones does some really interesting things with how her fantasy world works and how it may be related to the world you and I know.  I particularly enjoy fantasy in which you and I, as readers, are "Otherized" (if I can use that word) by the characters and the social structure of the fantasy world.  Here's one of my favorite examples of what I mean:  In Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy puruses the books on Mr. Tumnus' shelf.  The titles include things like Man:  Myth or Reality and other titles that would suggest that in Narnia humans are mythical creatures of the fairie realm, much as we might think of elves and satyrs.  (I don't have the title of Tumnus' book quite right, I'm sure, and my coies of TLWW are all in my office at work, so I can't look it up just now.)  But you get the point:  we are made to feel Other, foreign, outsiders, strange, even disenfranchised in some way.  I don't know why, but I find fantasy that constructs the reader this way as particularly interesting, enjoyable fantasy.  And there are certainly moments when Jones does this quite well.  In all sincerity, I hope that this concept makes its way into a conference paper or something of that sort sometime soon in my professional life.