Book completed

[eve_prime]

House of Many Ways, by Diana Wynne Jones. This book is also a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, but with an all-new main character. It's quite fun and like the others has a last chapter with a great deal of action and tying up of multiple threads. In this story, a teenage girl named Charmain just wants to read and relax, but a difficult older relative signs her up to do housesitting for the kingdom's wizard, who needs to go off to be healed by elves. She ends up involved in all sorts of magical and political mischief. The part I found most amusing was her gender-flipping assumption that the wizard's newly arrived male apprentice should be doing all the housework.