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After finishing reading Howl's Moving Castle, I wanted to re-read Castle in the Air. It is an unusual sequel, because the characters we know from the first book are in disguise (by magic of course, in this case not their own) when we first meet them in this story, and even that is not right away. We actually follow a day-dreaming carpet merchant named Abdullah, whose fairy-tale daydreams start coming true after he buys a magic carpet-- he meets a beautiful princess, he ends up wandering in the desert and runs into the villainous bandit he dreamed up, and ends up on a quest to rescue the princess he loves. Of course, his daydreams literally are coming true because a djinn has overheard them and is playing a bigger game.

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The delightful story of Sophie, Howl, and Calcifer. In a magic, fairy-tale land where seven-league boots actually exist (although they are demonstrated to be difficult to control when your balance is very good), Sophie doesn’t ever bother to seek out her fortune because she knows as the oldest of three sisters, she is destined to fail first and worst. Her sisters aren’t afraid to seek out what they want (even to the extent of deceiving their mother to trade places), but Sophie stays where she is. Only when she is cursed into old age does she venture out, and her “disguise” as an old woman gives her a new kind of freedom-- she isn’t afraid, she’s more willing to speak out and do what she wants, even to the extent of forcing herself into the castle of the wizard Howl as his housekeeper. Howl is selfish, vain, slapdash, and heartless (literally, in a way, because of his contract with Calcifer that Sophie is supposed to be trying to figure out and break), and yet he is also sweet, quite thoughtful at times, and tenderhearted. Of course, it is Sophie’s qualities as an older sister that make her capable of dealing with Howl-- when he has a tantrum of green slime, she and Michael push him to the bathroom and dump him in the tub, and Sophie mops up the slime that is everywhere.

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As an infant, Sabriel nearly-- or, to be more accurate, briefly-- died. But her father, Abhorsen, stepped across the boundary between Life and Death, and brought her back. Abhorsen is a necromancer unlike any I have ever read about-- instead of summoning the dead, he binds the dead that haunt the living, and he assists-- or forces-- them to cross the final gate. Now a young woman and nearly finished with her schooling in Ancelstierre, Sabriel learns that something has happened to her father-- he is either bound somewhere in Death, or perhaps actually dead. So, she crosses back into the Old Kingdom, where she discovers that Abhorsen is not a name but a title, and that she has inherited it. A powerful, Greater Dead creature and its minions are stirring, and she must outrace them to find her father and save the kingdom.

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