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Patricia C. Wrede's Calling on Dragons is the third Enchanted Forest book, a comic fantasy for 10 year olds, and this time the story belongs to the witch.
Morwen lives in a neat grey house with a red roof and nine cats. Not one of the cats is black. Not one of them agrees with any of the others about anything.
Morwen is not much like a witch either. She is under thirty, she has neither wrinkles nor warts, she wears rectangular glasses and loose black robes because they are comfortable, and she grows lilacs in a garden that is supposed to hold nothing but poisonous things.
Painted in gold above her front door it says NONE OF THIS NONSENSE, PLEASE.
The trouble arrives when an enormous white rabbit gets himself stuck in that lilac. He is seven feet eleven inches tall counting the ears. He is called Killer. This morning he was an ordinary rabbit nibbling an ordinary clover patch.
Morwen goes to look at the clover and finds burnt holes in the moss, which is what happens when a wizard sets down the end of his staff.
That is a problem, because wizards are not allowed in the Enchanted Forest any more. The King threw all of them out before he married Cimorene. So either somebody is wrong about the holes, or the wizards are back.
The real pleasure here is the arguing. Morwen can understand her cats and nobody else can, so every conversation has a second, ruder conversation running along underneath it. Trouble thinks everyone should be turned into a toad. Fiddlesticks wants fish and has already had fish. Aunt Ophelia is unbearable on the subject of what you can expect from a rabbit.
Killer is the other joy. He is vast and permanently apologising and he would honestly rather go home now, if that is all right with everybody.
Your reader really does want the first two books before this one. Cimorene and Mendanbar are already married, the wizard business already has history, and coming in here means the jokes land but the plot does not.
There is very little here to trouble anybody, beyond some magical scuffling.
Cimorene is worth meeting properly first, and Dealing with Dragons is where she starts. She is the youngest of seven princesses and bored out of her mind, and rather than marry a suitable prince she runs off and takes a job with a dragon.
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