DWJ ReRead: Puss In Boots
Once upon a time, there was a handsome miller’s son who owned a very clever cat… so begins this retelling of Puss In Boots. Published in 1999 by Scholastic, this is a very small chapter book, similar to the World Book Day books that are exchangable for book tokens now. (Not that we have that system here in Malaysia!) Perhaps because of this, rather than the usual DWJ story, this is pretty much the classic Puss In Boots tale that I grew up with. Honestly, with the current popularity of the Shrek franchise, this actually felt refreshing!
I reread this close to my last reread of Dark Lord of Derkholm in 2021 (!) and again last year, when my niece, who was curious about the Shrek character, asked me to read it to her. I’ve read to her quite a bit, and the thing is, she generally isn’t very interested in books or films (she’s 7 now). Most of the time, she enjoys having picture books read to her, but she gets bored of chapter books after the first couple of chapters. But when I was reading this book, she was rapt the whole way through. She loved Puss as the Marquis, and she was actually engaged, asking questions about scenes she wasn’t sure about.
For the longest time, I wondered what I could say about this book that I enjoyed but doesn’t really have any of the things I find in DWJ stories – the subverting of fantasy tropes, the character development, the way magic work in her worlds. This book? It’s Puss In Boots – told in a very fairy tale fashion, where the characters are archetypes rather than fleshed out people. I do like how the central focus of the story is Puss In Boots rather than the miller’s son. But most of all, I love that this was a rare chapter book that my niece wanted me to read her all the way through.
DWJ ReRead no. 54 | Puss In Boots (1999)
previous read: The Dark Lord of Derkholm
next read: The Year of the Griffin
I was in kind of a reading slump for the last couple of months, only reading comics when I’m reading at all. Recently I realised that I really needed to DNF my then-current read (A Tale of Two Princes by Eric Geron) and pick up something else from my digital TBR stack. And so I started on this book… and it’s really cute?
Dark Lord of Derkholm was first published in 1998, and I got my copy (a 2001 reissue) in 2006. By this time, I had started working part-time at our first (and if I were to judge on availability of DWJ and other favourites, which I do, the only) decent bookstore in my city (note that I also got my copy of Deep Secret in 2006!). I remember having seen copies of Dark Lord and Year of the Griffin on the YA shelves a few times, despite the fact that these books are definitely not YA. I went on collecting almost all the other DWJs I could find first, before finally picking Dark Lord up, because unlike the rest of the books, which mostly had cost me about RM 14.90-19.90 per copy, this book was RM 27.95. This was a lot of money to me then, and thinking about it now it seems hilarious, because I don’t think the average salary have increased much since then (if I was still a part timer, I would only be making 1 extra ringgit per hour now!) but the cheaper paperback books are now around RM 45, with many American editions going up to 80 ringgit. 
“The Girl Jones” is an essay about an incident in Diana Wynne Jones’ childhood that was included in the Sisters anthology (stories about the not-so-easy parts of sisterhood) in 1998. In it, DWJ explained that she was called “the girl Jones” by the people in her village if she was called anything at all, and told the story of one of the adventures that made her so notorious.
Sometimes I look back at the world before GoodReads was a thing, and I had Google in a pocket, and we actually had a decent bookstore in my city, and I wonder about all the books I might have missed. Deep Secret was published in 1997, and I know for sure that I was already a Diana Wynne Jones fan by then. And yet my first copy of this book, the somewhat expurgated Starscape edition with a pretty cover by Charles Vess, became mine in 2006. What was I doing in all those year in between?? (I was probably about the same age as Nick in this book, so I wouldn’t have had much money for new books when this was published, not to mention the bookstores here wouldn’t have had a copy, but still.) 
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland was first published in the UK in 1996, and reads a bit like TV Tropes for those big fat fantasy trilogies that were so popular back then. I don’t read a lot of this particular brand of fantasy, but I’ve read enough that I find most of the entries immediately recognisable.
ghostgrrrl reads 