Paperspine Blog

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is about a young girl named Sophie and a wizard named Howl.  

Sophie works in the hat shop owned by her stepmother – it used to be her father’s. Sophie is rather like an old lady, even though she’s a young woman: she stays in, working on the hats more than going out. She accidentally offends the Witch of Waste and becomes cursed. Sophie is turned into an old woman and cannot tell anybody was has happened to her. She realizes that she cannot stay at the hat shop – nobody would recognize her – so she sets off and ends up running into Wizard Howl’s castle.

Howl’s castle moves from place to place. Howl himself is said to be terrible. In town, the rumors are that he eats the hearts of beautiful young women. Sophie reasons that she’s no longer a young woman and believes she wasn’t very beautiful to begin with, so she invites herself to be Howl’s new maid.

Along the way, she meets the fire demon, Calcifer, who can see through the curse on her. Calcifer agrees to turn Sophie back the way she was if she can break the contract that Howl and Calcifer have signed. One of the stipulations of the contract was that neither Calcifer nor Howl can disclose the terms of the agreement. Slowly, Sophie and Calcifer become good friends.

Sophie also becomes good friends with Michael, Howl’s apprentice. Michael basically runs the day-to-day business for Howl. Howl can be rather inefficient with money, so Michael hides bits of the money they receive so that they’ll have money for the future.

The story itself is a bit hard to explain and anything I say here would contain too many spoilers, anyway. The characters alone would be a good reason to read this book, but the story itself is fantastic. If you like fantasy at all, check this book out. (And maybe even if you don’t normally read fantasy -  I think most people would like this book.)

And now, a confession on WHY I read this book:

One day, I was skimming through one of my book communities, when suddenly I saw the name of this book casually mentioned in a "books I’ve read this year" post. This was one of those things this didn’t register until several seconds later. I had to stop and scroll back. This couldn’t be: one of my favorite anime movies was a book? My first thought: "Why didn’t anybody tell me this before?!"

Well, of course I had to read the book. And, I have to be honest here, I enjoyed both the book and the movie about the same amount. But they’re so different that they’re only loosely the same story. I highly recommend reading the book AND watching the movie… I think this is one of those few times that you won’t be disappointed by the movie version. Be sure to catch them both.