The Lives of Christopher Chant (The Chrestomanci Series, Book 4) - Softcover

Diana Wynne Jones

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006755186 ISBN 13: 9780006755180

Publisher: HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, 2005

Synopsis

The childhood of Chrestomanci. Everything in this book happens at least twenty-five years before the story told in Charmed Life...

Discovering that he has nine lives and is destined to be the next ‘Chrestomanci’ is not part of Christopher’s plans for the future: he’d much rather play cricket and wander around his secret dream worlds. But he soon finds that destiny is difficult to avoid, and that having more than the usual number of lives is pretty inconvenient – especially when you lose them as easily as he does!

Then an evil smuggler, known only as The Wraith, threatens the ways of the worlds and forces Christopher to take action...

About this title

Review:

Think of a world, almost like our own but a little more genteel and old-fashioned, where magic and witchcraft is as common as mathematics--but just as dangerous in the wrong hands. In The Lives of Christopher Chant--the fourth book in her Worlds of Chrestomanci series--Diana Wynne Jones succeeds in creating a vision of England close to our expectations of what should be, but subtly different enough to excite our interest and draw us into a strange new world of incredible reality and possibilities.

Christopher Chant is a dreamer, a boy who returns home each night with strange gifts from his nocturnal travels and leaves sand in his bed as proof. He's happy to play cricket and wander the world in secret--so having nine lives and being the next "Chrestomanci" is not part of his plans for the future. It's only when an evil smuggler known as The Wraith threatens his existence that the young Christopher truly takes hold of his destiny. He must try to halt his loss of lives and defeat evil before times runs out.

Set at least 20 years before the events as told in the first Chrestmanci novel, Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant is a detailed fantasy and wild adventure with dollops of humour that will challenge and intrigue every fan of this sequence of otherworldly novels.

Chrestomanci patrols the pages of three more full-length novels--Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona, Witch Week and in a collection of short stories, Mixed Magics. He is undoubtedly Diana Wynne Jones' finest creation and should not be missed. --John McLay

Review:

“...Her hallmarks include laugh-aloud humour, plenty of magic and imaginative array of alternate worlds. Yet, at the same time, a great seriousness is present in all of her novels, a sense of urgency that links Jones’s most outrageous plots to her readers’ hopes and fears...”
Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0006755186
• ISBN 13: 9780006755180
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 319
• Illustrator: Tim Stevens