Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones

[lightreads]

Archer's Goon

3/5. The one about Howard, whose father is supposed to produce 2,000 words every quarter for a mysterious personage, or else, and the or else gets his family entangled in a set of seven mysterious alien siblings controlling the town.

This is a weird one. It's making a subtle but strange point about the difference between unpleasant people who are sympathetic and interesting, and unpleasant people who are not. The difference being self-awareness. Howard knows he has the potential to be a twit, and he definitely sees the dark road his sister* (named Awful, just in case you missed it) could go down. But his father is a raging twit and has no idea, and is rendered insufferable thereby. That's some complex stuff for a kid's book, which is typical DWJ. But it's not all that much fun to read about.

*I gloss her as genderqueer, btw. You can make a pretty good case for it in the text, though it's clearly not what DWJ actually intended.

Comments

[lokifan]

I adore this one <3 and yeah, I think self-awareness and selfishness is suuuuch a huge aspect here. I hadn't thought about it in these terms before but I think self-awareness (and using it to get past unconscious selfishness) is a bigger theme than I'd realised in DWJ - Nick from Deep Secret, and Christopher ofc, would have some stuff to talk about with Howard!

I loved Quentin but I haven't read AG since I was a kid, lol, I feel like I'd probably agree reading it now!