The Spellcoats is the third book in Diana Wynne Jones’ Dalemark Quartet, and it has quite a different feel from its predecessors. The first two books involve the magical and mythical breaking out into ordinary life, somewhat in the first and much more thoroughly in the second. This book takes place a couple of centuries earlier, in a time when the magical and wondrous walks the land openly…and we begin to see the backstory for much of what happens later.

I liked the book well enough, but ironically, given that the book involves the weaving of two “spellcoats”, it’s with this book that the execution starts to unravel. The mythosphere of Dalemark involves the Undying Ones, god-like beings (though not gods) who have interbred with human beings. The older of the Undying Ones have great difficulty making themselves visible or comprehensible to humans; the younger, having more human in them, have less trouble; and some simply seem to be humans with magical powers and indefinitely long lives. And the problem is, they all have a plethora and a superfluity of names, and figuring out who is who and how they are related, and that this one is really that one at another time becomes rather a trial—though more in the next book than in this one.

But that’s another review.