The Pinhoe Egg (2006)

Another fun page-turner with interesting plots and multiple perspectives. I loved hearing about dwimmer, yet another new kind of magic in the Wynne Jones universe (perhaps a nod to Tolkien?), and I thought the alternating chapters from Marianne's and Cat's points-of-view worked very well. I do agree that most of the witches were annoying and/or outright evil, but at least they all get their comeuppance one way or another. ( )

I wish I had read this sooner after Charmed Life, as it is a pretty close sequel. I enjoyed the development of the world, the complicated family dynamic, and what was essentially an environmental message at the heart of the book.

Wish we'd seen more of Janet! She cracked me up in Charmed Life, and was very fun in this one but wasn't a main character. It's refreshing that she's not a magic-user, though.

Also, Chrestomanci's embroidered dressing gown to page ratio was extremely high. I think he may wear five or six different dressing gowns in this book! Exciting indeed. ( )

The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones is the sixth of the Chrestomanci series. Near Chrestomanci's, there's a pair of feuding families — both secretly magic users. Things come to a head when the matriarch of the Pinhoes is forced out of her home and into a retirement home. Uprooted from her home, a long lost egg is found and ends up in the care of those living at Chrestomanchi's manor — whilst he (as always) remains oblivious.

Coming off the excitement of reading the very satisfying and tight Conrad's Fate (book five), I couldn't wait to jump into The Pinhoe Egg. But the lengthy (and seemingly never ending) open scene of the Pinhoes trying to remove the matriarch soured me to the rest of the book.

I had a feeling these Pinhoe scenes were supposed to be funny — as so often baddies of lower socio-economic status are played up to be. But these sorts of baddies — who are always invariably bumbling but somehow super resilient — end up being forced caricatures, rather than being either funny or fully realized characters. The Pinhoes are the worst of the worst of this sort of character type.

So every scene involving either the Pinhoes or their rivals ended up being an excruciating chore to read. Eventually I got to the point of skimming / yelling at the Pinhoe scenes (as my husband can attest to).

Woven around all this Pinhoe padding, is a novella of Cat and his friendship with a couple of the more normal members of the rival families. They help clean out the old Pinhoe home which has layers upon layers of hidden magic, hiding even darker secrets. Among all this, they find an egg. It hatches under extraordinary circumstances and that helps them to finally piece together the long lost history of a terrible tragedy that had befallen the valley centuries ago.

Frankly if Jones had started with that tragedy and played it straight up, rather than trying for comedy, the book would have been a fantastic ending to an otherwise charming series. As it stands, though, it's by far my least favorite of the books even though it has some of my most favorite characters in it. ( )

The Pinhoe Egg is magnificent. Marianne is a great character, and the other Pinhoes are firmly established too - simplistic but not cardboard. I like Cat best - his was the first Chrestomanci story I read - so this illumination of his life is great. Not sidelight, it's a continuation of his story, since we haven't seen him as an adult or Chrestomanci yet. Joe and Roger together are nicely mad; Janet and Julia are left out of things a bit but when they do show up they're well-drawn. The way all the various storylines intertwine - Grammer's 'illness', the empty forest, Joe at the castle and Marianne in the village, the Pinhoe house, the egg, all the rest of it - is great. They seem quite individual to start with, then start getting mixed, then they turn out all to be facets or reflections of one problem. Though I have to say Chrestomanci's summing up, though no doubt accurate, comes way out of left field. I wish we'd seen some of the research that produced those answers. ( )

This is the first of the Chrestomanci series where I felt you could draw a detailed map of the localities and how they related to each other; in fact, that's just what I did! This gave the characters a landscape in which to work and interact, and helped to make the story more grounded, as it were, than some of the others in the series. This was, for me, one of the richest and most satisfactory of the Chrestomanci stories, as well as one of the longest, and helped to further enrich the sequence as a whole. ( )