Archer’s Goon

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Archer’s Goon is one of my favorites, too, and it’s also one of the absolute weirdest of Diana Wynne Jones’s books to me. A young evacuee from the London blitz is captured and taken to Time City, a place that exists in space and time outside history. This is also Jones of the 80s, my favourite decade of hers, not the mellow and a bit obsessed with domesticity Jones of the aughts, but Jones who is full of energy and ideas.

The scene is hardly set in an urban family home when the author throws in the inciting incident: a intimidating pinhead giant is sitting sprawled out in the Sykes kitchen and won’t leave until he’s given the “two thousand” due to a certain Archer.Fairytale elements abound, principally seven siblings (with the youngest being special) as also absent parents, and hints of other fantasies ( The Hobbit, Arthurian legends), with underground sequences hinting at mythology.

Also, there's an element of fat phobia, which is the second time I've noticed that from Jones; it's an unpleasant trend. The story is interesting and worth reading, but it's not a fast-paced story and some might not be able to finish the book because of it. Diana Wynne Jones wrote different types of fantasy/sci-fi/magic books and this is of the kind set in our own world but secretly magic exists. The six siblings could not leave the town all that time not because of Quentin's words, but because their parents laid it on them to protect Venturus, and as long as Venturus–Howard was too young to realize his magical powers, they had to be close by to protect him.Jer dečja knjiga sa "čarobnjacima" u naslovu nekako priziva livadice i zamkove i bradate čike sa šiljatim šeširima. Howard informs her that the words have been delivered to Archer for the past thirteen years and this makes Dillian believe that Archer is behind them all being stuck there. I’ve heard complaints that this book runs a lot slower and is harder to get into, but that’s part of why it’s in my favourites – by the end of it, all the details that didn’t seem so important at first comes together and made perfect sense. There is so much to admire here, and a huge cast of characters, each of whom is important, is distinctive and memorable, despite only appearing briefly in person.

Reading David Langford's collected Critical Mass columns recently, I was startled by how many of the books I loved I'd first encountered on those reviews' original magazine publication. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook).Despite having a broad cast of characters – the Sykes family, the siblings who run the town, the Goon and Fifi, plus Shine’s lieutenant Ginger Hind – every single one is fully fleshed out with their own motivations, schemes, beliefs and opinions on what’s going on.