| $@%&! level: Low “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Medium-Low Back Cover: “Eight years after the end of Mr. Chesney's offworld Pilgrim Parties, the Wizards' University is in a shambles. Wizard Derk's griffin daughter Elda and her fellow first-year students encounter tyrannical tutors, boring lectures, and truly terrible refectory food. But things get even worse when the University sends a letter to each of their families begging for funds. Now Elda and her friends must contend with a band of trained assassins, a flock of renegade griffins, and an unexpected trip to the moon. Even with all the magical means at their disposal, will they make it through their first year?” |
Incidentally, I love the point Derk makes that the teachers at the Wizards' University now are the ones who spent their entire school-time preparing to be the Wizards for the Pilgrim Parties, so they only ever learned what they'd need to do that job well. They never learned the more advanced magic or magical theory because their teachers knew they wouldn't need it. I suspect that might be a bit of a commentary on the public school system, but I won't say absolutely that it is because Diana Wynne Jones was from the UK, where things might be different in that regard.
Anyway, in spite of the lack of bumbling tourists, the sequel manages to retain a similar level of absurdity as the first, along with the building sense of looming disaster. In the first one, disaster was exactly what needed to happen, and in some ways that's true of this story as well. The Wizards' University has got some serious flaws, more than just the one I just mentioned, and one of the biggest ones is that the people running the place don't see any flaws at all. In that situation, sometimes the only way to draw attention to the problems is to let them go smash and then come in to pick up the pieces. Well, maybe that's not the only way to do it, but when it comes to story telling it is definitely the most entertaining.