I should add, btw, that Fire & Hemlock is DWJ's darkest and most complex book and that adult readers can sometimes bounce hard off the child-adult romance in it. (It's handled very well, but I do understand now why other people sometimes really can't deal with it, whereas it never even occurred to me as a teenager!) At her best, she's always very light on the surface, very humorous, very honest and readable, but very dark when you poke at things. F&H also is constantly riffing on lit of all kinds (the ballads themselves, TS Eliot, many, many children's books and more).

I really still love her as an author, as you can tell - in my ways she formed a lot of who I am and how I think and was very light made me laugh at the same time. I never seem to get on as well with her adult novels (the Derkolm books and the Magids) but I love most of her YA stuff so much. (I bounce hard off the Dalemark Quartet, but a lot of people love those. She's always so different that I think most DWJ fans have at least one of her novels that happens with - and it's F&H for a lot of people.)

Howl's Moving Castle, though, is mainly just being subversive about fairy/folk tale tropes and turning them on their heads, filled with awkward and flawed people - it's one of her most fun. But I know someone else who loves the film who just hated the book because the characters were so different. (And, hearing that, and loving the book, I suspect I'd therefore get annoyed at the film, even though I know it's supposed to be quite good in its own right.)