Howl's Moving Castle

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Neil Gaiman described novelist Diane Wynne Jones as the best children's writer of the last forty years. Written in 1986, this novel has since become a classic, suitable for reading anytime, anywhere, and won the Phoenix Award in 2006, twenty years after its publication. It was also adapted into a popular film directed by the acclaimed Hayao Miyazaki, which won the Mainichi Film Festival Award in 2004 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.

The novel is rich with themes, most notably destiny, aging, courage, and love. Sophie initially resigns herself to her fate as the eldest of her sisters, and in her eyes, the firstborn bears the mark of failure, so she sees no need to exert any effort to change this destiny. However, the witch has a different opinion, transforming Sophie into an old woman, forcing her to venture out in search of her fortune, even as she tries to find a remedy to restore her stolen youth.

From the moment she set foot in the castle, Sophie rearranged Howl's world—and her own—from cleaning up the place to reawakening what time had extinguished within both Howl and herself. Sophie wasn't an epic figure, nor did she possess the superhuman abilities one would expect from the wizarding world she'd stumbled into. But she worked wonders with the little she had, and it turned out that her little was much, very much, for she breathed new life into Scarecrow, Firefly, and Howl himself.