{"id":175,"date":"2008-01-30T17:29:55","date_gmt":"2008-01-30T22:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=175"},"modified":"2008-01-30T17:29:55","modified_gmt":"2008-01-30T22:29:55","slug":"the-chronicles-of-chrestomanci-volume-1-by-diana-wynne-jonesharpercollins-2007-originally-2001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-chronicles-of-chrestomanci-volume-1-by-diana-wynne-jonesharpercollins-2007-originally-2001\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1, by Diana Wynne JonesHarperCollins, 2007 (originally 2001)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This volume comprises two previously-published books: <em>Charmed Life<\/em>, which I&#8217;d read before, and <em>The Lives of Christopher Chant<\/em>, which I hadn&#8217;t. I owned a paperback copy of <em>Charmed Life<\/em> when I was a kid, and read it over and over: it&#8217;s just the right combination of magic and cleverness and humor and excitement. Eric (Cat) Chant and his sister Gwendolen live in a world much like ours, except that in their world, magic is commonplace. Gwendolen&#8217;s a witch with ambitions of power &#8212; but when she and Cat are sent to live in Chrestomanci Castle with the most powerful enchanter in the world, things don&#8217;t go quite as she expects. Chrestomanci himself is excellent: always wearing funny dressing-gowns and managing to be vague and stately and terrifying all at once: at one point he leaves a room &#8220;like a very long procession of one person&#8221; (p 51), a description that I think is about perfect. And so it was pleasing to read, in<em> The Lives of Christopher Chant<\/em>, about his childhood, his own magical upbringing and youthful escapades, including jaunts through a series of other worlds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This volume comprises two previously-published books: Charmed Life, which I&#8217;d read before, and The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I hadn&#8217;t. I owned a paperback copy of Charmed Life when I was a kid, and read it over and over: it&#8217;s just the right combination of magic and cleverness and humor and excitement. Eric (Cat) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}