Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones.
HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, 2000 (1982).
a parallel world | where they persecute witches | and children aren’t safe
Witch Week was the first Chrestomanci books to focus solely on a female protagonist’s point of view, and is much the better for that. It feels as though Diana Wynne Jones has included a lot of autobiographical material in her treatment of Nan, an orphan witch girl who is at Larwood House, a boarding school in Hertfordshire. Nan is much more of a rounded character than the young male leads in previous books in the sequence, Christopher, Cat and Conrad, who sometimes come across as pleasant wimps or clueless actors in the unfolding story.
True, Nan is largely pleasant and clueless in her attempt to discover the truth about the magic that is happening around her, but I get more of a sense of a real person here than the ciphers that are Christopher, Cat and Conrad.
The premise of the story is that Nan and her classmates exist in a world where witchcraft is punishable by death but where magic undeniably exists.
Continue reading “School for sorcery”
Calmgrove 