cimorene

I remember disliking Charmed Life from my childhood (that is, compared to other Diana Wynne Jones books), because I thought it was scary, and maybe a bit hard to follow. I was certainly too young to follow it when Mom first read it to me, but of course I've read it ample times since I was old enough. Still, somehow I didn't notice till I read it today that the source of all the irritation is how incredibly stupid the protagonists are. I mean, yeah, children - in fact, most people - are stupid, but there's a certain threshold of stupidity where reading about people doing it just makes me irritated and headachy. (Harry Potter is usually way, way past it, but that's kind of its schtick, so I won't compare.) And even though DWJ's child protagonists are almost always going through things cluelessly and finding out about them later, they're rarely this stupid and usually they're sympathetic and not irritating about it. Cat is sympathetic in her usual way, but he's over in Harry Potter or Nancy Drew levels of wrongheadedness, making every single choice obviously stupidly wrong. Why?

I see now that he's meant to be younger than I realised when I was younger, and that he's got a serious blind spot where his elder sister is concerned, not to mention a very dodgy upbringing, and no reason to trust authority figures in general, which probably believably accounts for this behaviour more or less. But it doesn't make it any less irritating to me, nor, I think, at all reasonable. I've never had sympathy for children who are too stupid to seek help from the proper authority figures when they obviously need it.