Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle

I just couldn't get into Alias Hook and when I lamented as such on the Facebook page a friend recommended Diana Wynne Jones as my replacement "J" for my A to Z. Years and years ago I had read some of Jones' standalones but realized that I had never read Howl's Moving Castle!

That is no longer the case.

Oh my gosh what a wonderful book! Witches and wizards and demons and curses and love and magic and .... and I'm really quite glad that it took me until now to read it because I'm not quite sure I would have appreciated it enough if I had read it when I was younger and it first came out. In fact, now I'm wondering if I should go and re-read the books of hers that I HAD read when I was young to see if they're entirely new to me with some decades of life added. Funny how that can happen, isn't it?