Changes

|title=Charmed Life (The Chrestomanci)

|author=Diana Wynne Jones

|buy=Maybe

|borrow=Yes

|pages=288

|publisher=Harper Collins Children's Books

|date=April 2007

|isbn=978-0007255290

}}

Cat Chant and his elder sister Gwendolen are orphans. Their parents have drowned in a paddle-steamer disaster and they are looked after by a certain Mrs Sharp, a Certified Witch. The Fund set up after the catastrophe helps with conventional education, while Gwendolen is receiving magic lessons from Mr Nostrum. Cat's and Gwendolen's lives change completely when a mysterious, powerful and a rather dashing personage - "You Know Who" - Chrestomanci himself takes the orphans to live with his family in the Chrestomanci castle. Gwendolen has high hopes for learning Advanced Magic and believes she's on the way to fame and power , but for the time being her increasingly more outrageous jinxes result in her magic being taken away from her: what is a witch to do, if her hopes for ruling the world are so cruelly squashed? What is the power the Castle is exerting on the children? Who are all those people surrounding Chrestomanci? And who is Chrestomanci himself?

The story is narrated exclusively from the point of view of Cat (though not technically by him) and there is a great deal of understated but very convincing emotional truth in the portrayal of his worries, feelings and attitudes. A younger brother, magicless and dominated by his rather fiery, selfish and bent on world-dominance sister, he nevertheless (and understandably) clings to her after the death of their parents and allows her to order him about and use (in more insidious ways too). ''Charmed Life'' is as much a tale of the children's adventure in Chrestomanci's Castle as of the undercurrents of sibling rivalry and emotional dependencies, as well as Cat's gradual disentangling from Gwendolen's dominance and coming to his own, if not, at least yet, coming of age.

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