Drowned Ammet by Diana Wynne Jones

Drowned Ammet by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another fantasy, this one about a boy raised to be a terrorist bomber who fails in his attempt to assassinate the tyrannical earl and ends up on the run with the earl's grandchildren.

The first 80% of this was really good for me. It was playing with the role of children in political drama. Our protagonists are all tools of adult agendas, either as a murder weapon or a bargaining chip in an arranged marriage. This is the second book in this series in which a protagonist's parents turn out to be separately awful in unique and chilly ways. Except this book was facing up to that more directly and chewing at it. The book treads some predictable but nicely done ground regarding the formation of an independent self. And I'm always a sucker for these 'people become prickly friends across a painful class divide' stories.

Then the last fifth turned into a lot of deus ex machina with actual gods, and the whole structure came tumbling down, with all that careful work she'd built going nowhere. Disappointing.




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