Magic in the Stars by Patricia Rice is a fun book to read.  The dialogue is crisp & attuned to the times.  It moves from chaos to disaster in a pleasing romp.  I gave it five stars.

 

Lady Azenor Dougal, Aster, had a constant reminder not to shirk her duty.  “I must not doubt my intuition,” she muttered as the carriage jounced in another muddy rut and rain blurred the windows.  “I must believe in my gifts.”

 

“An instinct that takes you out in this storm is not very trustworthy,” Aster’s companion intoned in her sepulchral voice. Clad in black, cloaked in gloom, Jennet loomed large against the opposite seat. “We should turn back.”

 

Aster had chosen Jennet for her melancholy unlikableness."

 

Describing her gift, Aster thought: "It was beyond dreadful to know when something awful would happen, and not be able to stop it.  There were days when she feared everyone was better off not knowing their fate."

 

She encountered Theo, Lord Theophilus to warn him about his brother Duncan's, the Marquess, poor alignment of planets in an astrological forecast.  He was struck by her attractiveness. He discounted her zodiac predictions & she was incensed.  "...she explained with less of the musical tone of earlier & more acerbic authority.  The fluffy morsel contained a hint of steel."

 

Theo did not want to assume the mantel of Marquess & the responsibility that went went it.  A Marquess is a British nobleman who has a rank below a duke & above an earl.

 

It seems Theo & Aster are star crossed from the beginning.

 

Aster & her sister, Bree, & cousin, Diedre, have gone to help Theo put his house in order so he can find a woman to marry since his brother Duncan was injured & his fiance deserted him.  "He blamed the long dry spell between mistresses for his illogical reaction to an irrational female."

 

Bree nearly shouted at Aster:  "One needs love to smooth over the difficulties, and heaven only knows, this household is simply bursting with difficulties."

 

I would like to thank the author & Rice Enterprises for a complimentary copy.  That did not change my opinion for this review.

 

Link to purchase: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CDNZFH4

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29105575-magic-in-the-stars

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Rating: 3.5 of 5

 

Overall, I was delighted with these stories. Most swept me away immediately. My favorites were:

 

What the Cat Told Me - How could I *not* enjoy a story from a cat's POV? My fave quote, "But Boy wouldn't listen. He had to have Princess. Or else he would go into a trance and see her that way. I understood then. Boy wanted kittens. Very little will stop boys or cats when they do."

 

The Master - Actually enjoyed this "it was a dream" story because it was more a prophecy aka warning. It was the one story I would've liked to keep on with to see if she listened to that warning.

 

The Plague of Peacocks - I love it when nosy do-gooders get their comeuppance.

 

Side note: This was my first exposure to Diana Wynne Jones, literary that is. I watched Howl's Moving Castle with my daughter years ago.

A good collection of Diana Wynne Jones’ short fiction. They’re not all her best work, but there’s some excellent stories here. Recommended for her fans.

The Girl Jones
A most excellent way to get out of babysitting, forever. Hilarious. Not fantasy, though.

Nad and Dan and Quaffy
Eh, I didn’t care for this one. Too self-referential, and kind of annoying. A female writer, at her word processor, makes contact with an alternate universe.

The Plague of Peacocks
A peaceful village is invaded by new neighbors. Their passive aggressive, do-gooder ways get worse and worse… until their just desserts are delivered, in the village’s own special way.

The Master
A vet takes a late-night call, and is led into a mysterious wood to tend to wolves. It’s framed as a dream… but in a far less-annoying way than most “it was a dream” stories.

Enna Hittims
A child is sick with mumps. To amuse herself, she pretends that her bed is a dramatic landscape… but when the tiny adventurers of her imagination come to life, things get out of hand… (Doesn’t most everyone get vaccinated for mumps there days? I’ll look at it as being a period piece…)

The Girl Who Loved the Sun
A story with a mythological feel, about a girl who becomes a tree, believing the sun will love her.

The Fluffy Pink Toadstool
Ha! Hippies might get a bit grumpy about this one, but it’s pretty funny. The mom of a family goes on a DIY craze, and foraging for food goes just a bit wrong.

Auntie Bea's Day Out
An annoying aunt doesn’t pay attention to warning signs at the seashore – and gets far more than she bargained for, on a whirlwind ‘tour’ of all different sorts of ‘islands.’

Carruthers
Due to an aural misunderstanding, a young girl thinks that a walking stick will magically beat her annoying father. The stick talks to her, and moves, but seems unwilling to do any beating. People think she’s pretty weird for bringing a cane everywhere, and talking to it. But in the end, she’s vindicated… in a rather unexpected way.

What the Cat Told Me
An evil wizard uses boys for nefarious purposes, but, with the help of a cat, one may finally escape… told from the point of view of the cat, which one may either find cute, or mildly annoying.

The Green Stone
A funny take-off on the quest story. All the heroes, sidekicks, and what have you are assembled at the inn yard, and a bard is there to report on their deeds. But the quest unexpectedly get aborted… in, of course, an unexpected way.

The Fat Wizard
A small-town story of magic gone wrong… or possibly, unexpectedly right. (“losing weight” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be “in shape…”)

No One
An amusing sci-fi story about a very poorly programmed household robot.

Dragon Reserve, Home Eight
A familiar-feeling but very enjoyable story… on a colony world, those with psychic powers are kept in swift and brutal check. So it’s not surprising that some families would try to hide their children’s abilities. The end of the story makes too much effort to backpedal from the nastiness the story has brought up, but I still liked it.

Little Dot
Another story from a cat’s point of view. But I liked this one. I’m not sure why Bast would be a Caribbean lady, not an Egyptian woman, but it’s fine. A bunch of cats must drive off their rescuer’s new girlfriend before she takes them to the pound… but she is more nefarious than even they could have guessed.

Everard's Ride
This is not a short story; it’s a whole novel. Not even a novella. It’s around 230 pages long. Why it wasn’t published as its own book, I do not know. It’s an early work by Wynne-Jones, originally written in 1966. It’s a very nice romantic fantasy… If one travels to a small island in the proper way, a medieval-ish ‘pocket’ world is discovered … Although rumors abound of ghosts, it’s very real, and there may be more there for some of the characters than there is ‘here.’

None of these short stories from Jones struck me as particularly engaging or charming.