Diana Wynne Jones

[Mistress of Darkness]

A Tale of Time City is definately my favorite. I really like the Howl books. Dalemark Quartet was okay, but I kept expecting that the books would be about the same characters, or characters from previous books would appear, and they didn't until the last book. I, like stacer, liked Spellcoat, but the others were just . . . weird. On the other hand, her weird ideas are often what makes her books so enjoyable. And her characterizations.

I sound like a parrot.

[stacer]

We discussed Dalemark a while back when I'd just finished them, and I remember having mixed feelings at the time. I really love the world, but I wanted to know more about each of the characters. Each character set deserved more time than one book. And there was the whole anachronism of setting up this medieval fantasy world only to suddly introduce gunfire halfway through, which completely threw me out of my suspended disbelief and made me go looking to see if she'd mentioned it previously. It was very, very strange.

Yet looking back, I still do enjoy them. But like I said, Power of Three was my favorite of hers. Probably because it's standalone, and given that her series can tend to go weird like Dalemark, it's nice to have a standalone that makes sense all of itself.

[Sigyn]

With the Dalemark Quartet, I just try to think of Spellcoats as a stand alone, because it doesn't really need the other ones. It's the only one I like of the four.