Mary Heim

Okay, so Meredith, my first book this week is Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne-Jones.

Awesome.

I have a feeling that most of our listeners are going to fall into one of two categories.

They either have read this book ages ago and have been on the Howl train for decades, or maybe they, like me, have had it in their periphery for years and years and just kept kind of not getting around to it.

I finally decided that in order to prioritize this book, I was going to put it on my Christmas Eve book list where my husband and I buy like a surprise book for one another.

And we give each other some gentle encouragement of what we might like to read.

He picked out an absolutely beautiful special edition, which is even more fun.

And I just had a blast reading this book.

In case you fall in the latter category like I did, here's the setup.

Sophie is the eldest of three daughters, and she is destined to fail miserably should she ever dare to leave her stepmother's hat shop and pursue her own fortune.

But when she attracts the ire of the loathed witch of the waste and is turned into an old woman, there is only one place she can think to go to try and reverse her fate.

The strange and mysterious moving castle of the wizard Howl.

Instead of the terrible stories Sophie has heard about Howell and his castle, when she arrives, she finds a modest home on the inside made up by Heartless, or is he, Howell, a snarky but multi-layered fire demon and more enchantment in her newfound home than she ever expected.

I will be honest that aside from hearing about this in the zeitgeist for years, I really had no idea what to expect from this book.

I knew that there was a moving castle.

I knew that there was a character named Howl.

That's like honestly it.

Howl's moving castle really reminded me of how often we read classics.

Now,

i'm going to say like agatha christie here i'm very well aware that i'm not comping agatha christie to diana wynn jones but when we read a classic in a genre we may originally not realize just how revolutionary the story is because when we see these tropes in literature constantly now it's like it was agatha who did it first right it is revolutionary it was revolutionary then