A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones

Like many of the children of London at the dawn of WWII in 1939, Vivian Smith is being sent to the country for her safety. At the railway station, she meets a boy who she initially thinks is her cousin, Marty, but who she soon learns is not. The boy, in truth, is named Jonathan, and he and his friend, Sam, are from Time City, a city frozen in time that monitors and records the entirety of the timeline.

The boys think that Vivian is really Vivian Lee, the missing wife of their city’s founder, who they believe is responsible for Time City’s slow deterioration and the increasing instability of the timelines of certain centuries and important events. Like when WWII occurred. They’re so convinced that Vivian Smith is Vivian Lee that they’ve broken every rule they possibly could in order to capture her, and by the time they realize that no, this Vivian really is just a normal girl, she’s trapped in Time City, and has to help them save the place.

This was a very fun DWJ, though, like Vivian, I often only caught the “thes” and “ands” in the explanations of how Time City worked. It’s a very imaginative world, but one that I suspect will be headache inducing if I think about it too much. There are some of the requisite DWJ evil authority/family figures, but the main ones are actually quite nice, if odd, and the plot works surprisingly well, given that it revolves around two boys kidnapping a girl. And it has one of the best androids ever.

Mort by Terry Pratchett

Mort’s father thinks that Mort thinks too much to ever be a good farmer, and so he takes Mort to a local hiring fare, hoping he’ll be chosen as someone’s apprentice. It looks like he’ll be left to rot when a cloaked skeleton on a white horse rides up and offers him a job as his apprentice. At least, Mort sees a cloaked skeleton offering him a job as Death’s apprentice. His father sees an undertaker.

This is kind of a take on “Death takes a holiday” except that this Death tries to actually be responsible about it and train a replacement. Mort, however, isn’t very good at it and seems to mess up as often as not, something that Death doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy playing with kittens and trying to make more creative bugs and hint that Mort should marry Death’s adopted daughter, Ysabell. Since Mort and Ysabell pretty much hate each other, Mort is trying very hard not to notice the hints, and Ysabell is hoping that he’s successful at that.

This is my third Pratchett, and probably the one that worked best for me, though I spent a lot of it not really sure what I thought of it. I thought Death was a hoot (though I was briefly worried that he was going to make kitten curry, and if he did, you can just keep it to yourself) and enjoyed the zaniness of Mort’s mistakes and his various allies. I wouldn’t have minded reading an entire book at the princess who was supposed to die but didn’t, but the universe thought she was so she had to forcibly remind everyone she was there.

Also, Pratchett spent a lot of time dwelling on the fact that Discworld is supported by four giant elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. This made me wonder if there were people who lived near the edge of Discworld who could actually see the elephant’s heads, or see over the side. Or is that one of the things Pratchett would say their brains protected them from and would create an alternative?