“Frank and Jess thought Own Back Ltd. was an excellent idea when they first invented it. Three days later, they were not so sure” (1). That’s how this book starts, and reading those sentences, you know you’re in for a lesson-learning sort of book, but this being Diana Wynne Jones, it’s not too heavy-handed. Own Back Ltd. starts over Easter break, when Frank and Jess are bemoaning their lack of pocket money: they broke a chair, and their pocket money’s been stopped. It’s Jess who thinks of it first, wondering if “people pay you to do bad things for them” (p 2). Frank agrees that people must, and later that night the two of them make a notice advertising their new business: “Own Back Ltd./Revenge Arranged/Price According to Task,” for starters, and then, for good measure: “All Difficult Tasks Undertaken/Treasure Hunted, Etc.” (3). Though business is slow at first, things pick up quickly, and (surprise surprise) Jess and Frank soon find themselves in over their heads.
It starts with Buster Knell, the town bully, becoming their first customer: Buster wants revenge on Vernon Wilkins, an older kid who’s just knocked Buster’s tooth out. (The tooth was loose, anyhow, and Vernon was just fighting back after having been terrorized by Buster’s gang of friends, but Buster doesn’t quite see things that way.) Frank and Jess are a bit concerned: how on earth are they going to get a tooth from a kid who’s older and bigger and stronger than they are, and who’s brave enough to fight back to the town bully? But they’ve made a business deal, and can’t exactly say no to Buster, so they figure they’ll give it a try. When Frank and Jess show up at Vernon’s house, Vernon’s sitting on his front steps; his mom is just inside; his three baby sisters are playing in the mud next to the steps (and the youngest toddles over to Jess, smiling delightedly). The scene, as the book puts it, “could not have been less like a tooth-hunting expedition” (12). But Vernon, luckily, has a younger brother with a loose tooth, so that solves Frank and Jess’s first problem.
Things just get worse the next day, though, when two odd little girls from the neighborhood tell them they want revenge on Biddy Iremonger, who, they say, is a witch. Whether Biddy’s a witch or whether, as Jess’s mum says, she’s “just a poor old creature, and a bit wrong in the head,” this sounds like bad news (21). And when Jess starts to worry that Buster and his gang have given Vernon’s brother’s tooth to Biddy, for her to use in her witchcraft, things look even worse still. Jess and Frank’s next customer, at least, is easier: Martin Tailor, a rich kid who wants to get the two odd little girls (who used to live in the house where his family lives now) to leave him alone. But everything’s all tangled together, and Jess and Frank and Martin and Vernon, and even Buster and his gang, end up having to face Biddy, who’s set on reminding them all that revenge is “witch’s business,” not child’s play.
While this book is not as complex or nuanced as Dogsbody or Fire and Hemlock, or as endearing as Charmed Life or The Lives of Christopher Chant, it is a sweet and fun read with some details that made me smile, like the “tooth-hunting expedition” sentence quoted above, or like when Jess, at one point, says something without really thinking about it and then ends up “catching up with the conversation and discovering she meant what she said” (102). (I love that way of describing the situation, which feels really true to me: you say something in a sort of knee-jerk way, someone questions you on it, and then as you think it through and articulate things more fully, you realize you did indeed mean what you said, even if you couldn’t initially have said why.) The writing seems self-conscious sometimes—there’s lots of “as Jess said afterward,” which I found sort of jarring, but I love how Jess, on two different occasions, uses storytelling or a knowledge of stories to solve problems—first when she distracts Frankie and Jenny (those two odd little girls) from their crankiness by telling them a story, and then again at the end of the book. I also appreciate the descriptions of the setting, the sense of place: this book is set in England near Easter, a Britain of potting sheds and allotment gardens and “a marshy, tangled, waste strip beside the river where everyone threw rubbish,” a Britain where spring is “blank and bleak as winter,” rainy and wet and grey (4-5).
In non-book-related news, I’m a bit behind on all things Internet at the moment: I was in San Francisco for vacation from August 24-31, which was delightful. Eventually I’ll catch up on reviewing what I’ve been reading lately, and I might also write about San Francisco bookshops: I visited lots of them (though I restrained myself and only bought one book on my whole vacation, in part because I didn’t have much luggage: traveling with just a backpack + a messenger bag means being cautious about what one buys!).
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