Diana Wynne Jones.
I discovered Diana Wynne Jones as an adult.
Actually, that's only semi-accurate. Growing up, my (very tiny) local library had a (very tiny) fantasy section, and in it, there was a copy of Howl's Moving Castle. Once I'd discovered it, I checked it out and read it again and again.
Sometimes, in talking books with people, I'd mention it, but it was years before I found anyone else who'd read it. (I met that person my freshman year in college. We weren't particularly taken with each other... until we discovered that we had Howl in common. We're still friends today. Such is the power of Diana Wynne Jones.)
But it wasn't until after college, working in a children's book store, that I really discovered Diana Wynne Jones. And by 'discovered', I mean 'read every single DWJ title I could get my hands on'. I even stooped to pretending that customers had requested certain titles so that we'd stock them and I could read them. Was it wrong to use my workplace as my personal library? Possibly. But my love for her books won out in a brief struggle with my conscience, and it all ultimately resulted in lots of sales and new readers, so hopefully she (and my former employers) would approve.
Everyone who's read her has a favorite. Considering her range—from epic to comic to multi-verse world-hopping craziness to satire to genre-bending free-for-alls—I, myself have several. Howl will always be special: because it was my first; because I'd never read a story that played with the conventions of fairy tales before; because I loved it for the complexity of the storyline, which at the age I first read it, blew all other books out of the water; because those characters became—and still are—my friends.
Dark Lord of Derkholm, I loved for turning the tourists-in-fantasyland trope on its head. I loved it for the close-knit family, and for the griffins. I still have a crush on Kit.
And The Ogre Downstairs, which is one of her more unsung books, I love because it makes me laugh every time I read it and because even though the Ogre and Sally are secondary characters, they're no less real. But it's the placid horror the characters have for an everyday object—a cow-shaped creamer that you hold "by its tail, and it sort of vomits milk through its mouth"—has, for over a decade now, made me completely impossible in any home-goods store. (Yes. If you ever hear someone in the next aisle over making vomiting noises and then laughing like a lunatic, it's probably me. Blame Diana.)
After just re-reading The Ogre Downstairs*, I've realized that despite their surface differences—differences in plotline and tone and style and subgenre and world—the three books all have a few things in common. They're all about created, chosen families: in Howl, Sophie and Howl and Michael and Calcifer (and others) go from being a group tied together by necessity to a group tied together by choice; in Dark Lord, some of Derk and Mara's children are literally created, but all of them—griffin and human siblings alike—are loved fiercely (and equally) by their parents and by each other; and Ogre is about two very separate, different families coming together. All of them highlight DWJ's ability to give anything—and I do mean anything, whether it be a toffee bar, an intelligent goose, or a broom—life and personality. Each of the three is very, very funny at times, but never, ever slight; each also has moments of real darkness and danger. More simply put, each one, in its own way, is a joy.
Even though every time I re-read one of her books, I find something new, owning all of her books isn't remotely the same as knowing that there's a new one on the way. I never met her, I never knew her as a Person (rather than as an Author), but you can be sure that I'll miss her.
See much more DWJ love at the Celebrate DWJ tumblr.
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*Which I'll write about in depth later. That's actually what I meant to do here, but this clearly got away from me somehow.