Witch's Business

By -

 Witch's Business (Wilkins' Tooth), by Diana Wynne Jones

Our theme being "Old Friends and New," I started March with the first DWJ book I ever read (in 6th grade, about 1983).  DWJ commented that when she started trying to get published in children's books in the early 1970s, fantasy was unfashionable.  Publishers were only interested in what we used to call 'problem novels' -- realistic stories in which kids dealt with problems like child abuse, alcoholism, divorce, racism, and so on.  So she wrote a story that started off as a problem novel featuring poverty and bullying, but turned out to be a fantasy.  It was published in 1973.

Jess and Frank have had their pocket money stopped, and in desperation they start a business: Own Back, Ltd., will undertake revenge jobs and treasure hunting.  They hope to be able to think up ways of tormenting the local bully, Buster Knell.  Instead Buster hires them; he wants a tooth from Vernon Wilkins.  And then the two odd girls down the lane, Jenny and Frankie Adams, want revenge on Biddy Iremonger, who is an adult.  They claim that Biddy stole their house and inheritance, and made Jenny limp.  Of course it's nonsense, but they might as well go talk to Biddy.

Biddy Iremonger is the local oddball, but she can't be a witch.  She's just well-educated and eccentric, right?  Frank and Jess are horrified when Biddy calmly says that yes, she's a witch, and she won't take off the curse.  In fact, everyone is suffering Biddy's malice; she has enslaved the Adams adults and the bully gang, has used Wilkins' tooth in an evil spell, and now she has it in for Jess and Frank too.  How on earth can they fight her?


Biddy Iremonger (who has a perfect name) is a truly scary character.  She looks like your average oddball lady, but turns out to be vicious and uncaring.  None of the adults are really helpful in any way.  As in so many DWJ stories, the adults cannot be counted on to do any of the things they're supposed to do, and the kids have to use their ingenuity to figure out solutions.

I've read a couple of different versions of this book.  Buster Knell is given to using horrible language, and DWJ got creative with it.  In one version, it's literally colorful language -- he says things like "blue-purple pimpled zombies!"  In the version I have now, zombies still feature prominently, but they're surrounded in body-bits and gross fluids, so he might say "Sliced toes in puke!"  I think the colorful one is the original, but either way Buster has a truly creative vocabulary.

I think this story is kind of underestimated, though possibly only by me.  It's her first published effort in children's fantasy, and I used to think it wasn't as good as the others; but these days, I'm newly impressed every time I read it.  If you haven't yet added it to your DWJ list, do so!

Comments

  1. LoryMarch 13, 2022 at 12:05 PM

    A good start for your DWJ reading career! I started reading with Charmed Life only when I was in high school, but once I did, I wanted to track down all her books. This was an elusive one; my library did not have it, it was before the days of internet book searching, and it hadn't been reprinted yet. I vividly remember how excited I was years later when I found a copy in the University District branch of the Seattle Public Library and was finally able to check it out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanMarch 16, 2022 at 5:09 PM

      I hope it didn't disappoint! I had a similar experience with the Magicians of Caprona, which I didn't track down for years.

      Delete
    2. LoryMarch 21, 2022 at 10:56 AM

      No, I wasn't disappointed. I think it's really quite a subtly brilliant mix of realism and fantasy. I love the ensemble cast of children.

      Delete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more