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A review by remilauren
Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones
2.0
Sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, I went in with the hopes of reading lots and lots of Sophie and Howl, alas, how disappointed I was.
Castle in the Air revolves around a young Carpet Merchant Abdullah, who's often found daydreaming of an extravagant life. What he does when the Princess he falls for gets kidnapped by a Djinn, forms the crux of the story.
This book might seem completely unrelated to Sophie and Howl but it does tell a lot about them though not obviously and definitely not from the start. If you keep at it though, you'd meet a lot of the characters from the first book and some of them were with us throughout the book!
The writing style was quite different here, Abdullah's flowery language gave a sense of foreignness to the book. It really felt like I was reading a Middle Eastern book albeit translated a bit oddly in English. But the plot failed to engage me, I couldn't care less about this version of Aladin and Jasmine, there just wasn't anything interesting to them. They simply fell in love and the body shaming attitude of the MC didn't sit well with me either.
What I did care about was revealed at the end and here we delve into spoilers. At the end when we've seen the issues sorted and there was still no sign of Howl, I thought he won't ever make an appearance, but he turned out to be the Genie!! He was with us throughout although in a different form. There were other such characters too under enchantments and they all got revealed one by one at the end.
Surely marketing this as Howl's sequel is unfair on the author's part. It had such little of Howl and Sophie that I spent most of my time waiting for them to appear and it was not the best reading experience. The plot was average, characters were boring and the only elements that could have elevated the story for me came in so late and so jarringly, I didn't quite like it..
Castle in the Air revolves around a young Carpet Merchant Abdullah, who's often found daydreaming of an extravagant life. What he does when the Princess he falls for gets kidnapped by a Djinn, forms the crux of the story.
This book might seem completely unrelated to Sophie and Howl but it does tell a lot about them though not obviously and definitely not from the start. If you keep at it though, you'd meet a lot of the characters from the first book and some of them were with us throughout the book!
The writing style was quite different here, Abdullah's flowery language gave a sense of foreignness to the book. It really felt like I was reading a Middle Eastern book albeit translated a bit oddly in English. But the plot failed to engage me, I couldn't care less about this version of Aladin and Jasmine, there just wasn't anything interesting to them. They simply fell in love and the body shaming attitude of the MC didn't sit well with me either.
******SPOILERS*******
What I did care about was revealed at the end and here we delve into spoilers. At the end when we've seen the issues sorted and there was still no sign of Howl, I thought he won't ever make an appearance, but he turned out to be the Genie!! He was with us throughout although in a different form. There were other such characters too under enchantments and they all got revealed one by one at the end.
Surely marketing this as Howl's sequel is unfair on the author's part. It had such little of Howl and Sophie that I spent most of my time waiting for them to appear and it was not the best reading experience. The plot was average, characters were boring and the only elements that could have elevated the story for me came in so late and so jarringly, I didn't quite like it..