Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne JonesGreenwillow (HarperCollins), 2001 (Originally Collins, 2000)

Mixed Magics consists of four stories set in the same worlds as the Chrestomanci books, all during the time when Christopher Chant is Chrestomanci, the enchanter in charge of overseeing the use of magic. The longest story is almost sixty pages; the shortest is twenty pages; they’re all pretty fun. The book starts with humor, in “Warlock at the Wheel,” which features a minor character from Charmed Life who has “decided to take up a life of crime” since Chrestomanci took his magic away (3). The moral of the story is that crime doesn’t pay, which the Willing Warlock learns through a comedy of errors that starts with a bank robbery and features a bratty child, a demon dog, and a very vocal car.

The second story, “Stealer of Souls,” is the longest and also, I thought, the most satisfying: it features two familiar characters (Cat from Charmed Life and Tonino from The Magicians of Caprona), who end up having to work together to get themselves out of danger. I love the descriptions of Cat and Tonino in this story—how Cat is resentful because he feels like Tonino is usurping his place as the “youngest and unhappiest person in the castle”, or how Tonino is described as introducing himself “in excellent English, but with a slight halt at the end of each word, as if he was used to words that mostly ended in o” (24, 23).

I liked the premise of the next story, “Carol Oneir’s Hundredth Dream,” but it couldn’t quite compare to Cat + Tonino for sheer enjoyment. As the first line of the story puts it, “Carol Oneir was the world’s youngest best-selling dreamer”: she’s able to control her dreams, and a wizard who specializes in such things can then bottle those dreams for sale to other people. But Carol, who has a pushy stage mother, seems to have the dreamer’s equivalent of writer’s block: she’s stopped dreaming, or so she claims. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, and Chrestomanci helps figure out what’s going on.

In the last story, we’re in a new world entirely, this one called Theare, which is very orderly and has very orderly gods in a very orderly heaven. These orderly gods are nervous about a prophecy that tells of a Sage “who shall question everything,” and whose “questions shall bring down the exquisite order of Heaven and cast all the gods into disorder” (108). The gods set out to try to avert this prophecy by finding and banishing the Sage, who they think is Thasper, the son of one of the gods. As another prophecy puts it, though, “strange things happen when destiny is tampered with,” and things don’t quite go as the gods had planned (111).

This was a fun read, not as totally engrossing as the Chrestomanci novels because of the shorter form, but pleasing nevertheless.