Diana Wynne Jones: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci: Volume 1. This author has come highly recommended by various people, particularly ronincats. So when I found this omnibus edition in the discount rack I did not hesitate to put money down.

PLEASE NOTE THIS REVIEW WILL BE FULL OF SPOILERS
This omnibus edition features Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, both very much young adult fantasy. In the first, Eric Chant, called Cat, is the protagonist, though it is his older sister Gwendolyn who drives much of the plot. In the second, Christopher Chant is the protagonist. Both are boys of indeterminate age but apparently preadolescent. The two stories are presented in publication order rather than chronologically, since Christopher Chant is the adult Chrestomanci of the first story.

What is the Chrestomanci you ask? It is the one person who has nine lives and thus is an enchanter so powerful that he (so far all of the people mentioned as holding this position are male) can keep all of the magical people with bad tendencies in line. How does this guy end up with nine lives? Well, you see, there are different worlds (the alternate histories idea), organized into series. The magicians in this magical world have identified 12 series of parallel worlds, and generally each series consists of 9 closely related worlds, except for series 11, which appears to be only a single world. So a person who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds in the series ends up with all of the lives himself (once again, only males as far as I've seen). Both Cat and Christopher live in series 12 in an alternate England where there's magic rather than technology. So Chrestomanci is employed by the government to keep the worst excesses of evil magical people under control and this person lives in an enchanted castle with a magical garden and quite a staff of domestic servants.

In Charmed Life, Cat and his sister Gwendolyn become orphans at the beginning of the story. Gwendolyn is a witch with lots of potential, so she gets magic lessons from the necromancer next door. She writes a letter to Chrestomanci and the two orphans are taken to Chrestomanci castle. Gwendolyn thinks this is the beginning of her destiny to rule the world, and she throws increasingly larger magical tantrums when she's generally dismissed and treated as a rather spoiled and ignorant child. Neither she nor Cat has figured out that this isn't about her at all, it's about him. Gwendolyn runs away (magically of course, even though her magic was taken away), leaving a double from a parallel world (apparently just like ours) in her place. Janet (the new girl) and Cat find themselves over their heads in the mess that Gwendolyn has created: owing money for magical contraband, challenged to a magical duel for changing the serving girl into a frog, and strongarmed into the necromancer's nefarious plot to seize power, while fending off the attacks from Julia, Chrestomanci's daughter who's holding a grudge against Gwendolyn and hasn't figured out the switch.

This is very much a children's story, with the protagonists apparently unable to turn to adults for help, even though that is the obvious solution and the competent adults are giving them plenty of opportunities to ask for help--including Chrestomancie, his nice wife Millie, and the tutor. And of course, Cat goes along passively with his sister's misdeeds right up until the bitter end. I suppose this could be considered an example of learned helplessness. Of course, it's all made right in the end; Cat learns that he has his own magic and how to use it. The wicked magic-users are defeated (barely) and the older sister is pretty effectively banished.

It's generally charming and entertaining and well written. I particularly liked the portrayal of children's lives--from eating magical gingerbread men to tea in the schoolroom to playtime with animated soldiers. I just wanted to kick Cat for crying "woe is me" and doing nothing for far too long. And the weakest point is just how the hell his older sister managed to take advantage of his magic all these years, particularly without any real training. She extracted his nine lives and place them in an enchanted pack of matches. That would seem to be pretty advanced stuff. In fact, in The Lives of Christopher Chant, the adult guardians of the boy hero do effectively the same sort of thing for his protection since he's gone and carelessly lost so many of his lives already. And it's clear that it was not an easy spell. And then Gwendolyn burns one of his lives whenever it's convenient--how does that work? How is it that a teenage(?) girl ends up being the biggest villain and the worst danger? That's my biggest beef with it--to me it doesn't make sense that she could parasitize him quite without training, but hey, not my world or magical system.

Christopher Chant isn't an orphan. Instead, he's effectively raised by an every-changing sequence of servants while his parents exist in a state of perpetual warfare and take no interest in their only child. He can travel to all of the worlds and all of the series (well, except #11) in his sleep. It turns out this is called spirit walking, but it is more real for him--he has an actual physical presence and he can bring things back with him from his travels. And so he consoles himself in his loneliness by endless nights of visits to other worlds making friends wherever he goes and during the day playing with the few toys from these expeditions that he manages to bring back. His uncle learns his secret and asks him to perform some experiments. This is how Christopher meets Tacroy, a more conventional spirit walker (who relies on music and incense and trances to travel) hired by Uncle Ralph to supervise Christopher's actions.

Christopher and Tacroy go on many missions to bring things back from other worlds. One of the first items is a cat from the Temple of Asheth, where Christopher meets a young girl who is the living goddess, in effect an avatar. The two young people agree to a trade: the most obnoxious and troublesome cat in exchange for some exciting novels from elsewhere to while away the long hours of isolation in the temple. However, Christopher is speared by temple guards while trying to escape with the cat. He's presumed dead, but then he wakes up at home with the cat, so apparently everything is okay. But then in the struggle with the cat, he gets impaled by a curtain rod--apparently dead again. But wait, he wakes up just fine. It was just a little misunderstanding. Then Christopher goes to boarding school and eventually resumes more missions for his uncle. He also eventually returns to the temple with some books for the living goddess. They strike up a friendship, and he continues to visit her. Once again, something goes awry on a mission to another world, but he wakes up fine. Then once again he dies in a bizarre cricket accident. This time there are too many witnesses to ignore the fact that he did die but now he's not dead. So he winds up at Chrestomanci Castle with the expectation that he'll be the next big guy. But he hates it there. No one asked about his wishes. Eventually he hears about The Wraith, some sort of black market kingpin who's been smuggling incredible quantities of illicit magical items from other worlds. Can we guess the connection? Of course, but it takes Christopher way, way too long to figure out that his uncle is using him just like everyone else, and in fact worse, because he's causing a lot of harm along the way. Before that realization hits, the living goddess follows him back to his own world. She just wants to live a normal life with boarding school and friends and everything else she read about in those stories about Millie. And she doesn't want to die, since the goddess is always a child, and she's getting old. So that's another crisis that interlocks with the whole smuggling kingpin crisis.

In general, I liked this story better than Charmed Life. The hero, while slow, is actually thinking about things and discovering things and making decisions and acting on them. In other words, he's active, involved, and far more self-aware. And the developing relationship between him and Millie is sweet. He's thinking about others just as much as himself. And the comic bits are much more effective in this story than Charmed Life.

I do have one problem though, and it's big. Tacroy is the only black character in this story. In this alternate England there are apparently no racial minorities. But that's not all. It turns out that Tacroy is really from the mysterious series 11--an entire Dark World (not just a continent) of black people. Who are evil. In fact, when Tacroy confesses that he is from this mysterious unknown place, he warns them not to believe in the "Noble Savage" because they're not noble at all, just savage. Who wear furs and trinkets. They have an entire caste system built on bullying, lying, cheating, and otherwise being horrible people. In fact, they are so terrible that their souls are all deformed and ugly. So when Christopher seeks Tacroy's soul among the many disembodied souls presented by the Dright (supreme ruler of this world), he is able to find it by its beauty and purity amidst so much ugliness. After all, Tacroy didn't grow up here--he was raised in the world run by white people. He's not like other black people. It's a good thing all those blacks are living in a single closed-off world away from all the nice white people on all of the other worlds. That's pretty over the top. It would have been far better to toss in a few token secondary characters of various races as J. K. Rowling did in response to complaints. Did I mention that these stories feel like a cross between Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events? ( )

First we have Charmed Life which is the story of a young boy named Eric "Cat" Chant. He is an orphan who lives with his forceful older sister, Gwendolen. They find some old letters of their parents' from Chrestomanci -- a very powerful enchanter who works with the government to manage the use of magic through various universes. Gwendolen writes to him and he decides to take the children back to his castle for their education. Gwendolen is excited because she has plans to be a famous witch. Cat doesn't think that he has the ability to do magic but as time passes, he discovers that someone he trusted may have been holding him back all along. This was a good story about a young boy who finds his own strength and learns to believe in himself. The world is not as complex as, say, the Harry Potter universe but it is very vivid and believable.

The second book is The Lives of Christopher Chant. This book is about another boy named Christopher Chant who has the ability to travel between universes. He is asked by his uncle to perform certain tasks in these worlds and he is enjoying himself and feeling important until he becomes suspicious of his uncle's motives. Eventually he meets the Chrestomanci of his time (a different man from the one we met in the first book) and has to decide to be loyal to his family or to stand up for what is right. Christopher is an entirely different sort of boy from Cat and this book greatly expanded the universe and also introduced us to many different universes and parallel worlds.

http://webereading.com/2008/07/chroni... ( )

Before there was Harry Potter there was Christopher Chant. Diana Wynne Jones' world of Chrestomanci. While not as nurturing and engaging as Harry Potter's world, these books are enjoyable and offer a different perspective on what a magical world might be like. Highly recommended. ( )

http://trinat.vox.com/library/post/ma...

Diana Wynne Jones is possibly one of the more well-known fantasy writers of her generation, and this reputation is well-deserved from reading the two books that comprise this first volume of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci. Her characters are deftly written, and are quite lovable despite many wacky quirks (see: Christopher Chant). I'm personally not fond of her usual retreat into a deux en machina ending, but after reading a few of her books, I'm thinking that this is probably a common occurrence and I should start getting used to it by now. ( )

which is witch craft, 9 lives is a little weird ( )