I had read several books by Diana Wynne Jones when I stumbled upon Power of Three in a second-hand stall. Unusual settings, unexpected plotlines and an engaging narrative were what I had come to expect of her and Power of Three did not disappoint. 

Set in the Moor, an enchanted, misty, green landscape filled with old magic, Power of Three describes a world that seems much like our own but is populated by Lymen, Giants and Dorig. The only good Dorig is a dead Dorig – this is a belief that guides the residents of the Moor and early in the book a Dorig is killed. Jones uses murder as the starting point for a period of misfortune – the Moor and its residents are all cursed. The Lymen siblings Ayna, Gair and Ceri set out on a quest to break the curse. Along the way, they befriend two Giant children, and later also meet two Dorig children. The interaction between the three sets of children is at once hilarious and thought-provoking. When the Dorig take off their outer clothes, the others are startled: All his [Gair’s] life he had heard Dorig talked of as ​“he” – or, most frequently, ​“it” – and it had never occurred to him until this moment that there must be Dorig girls. This moment marks a shift in the relationship between the children, who realise how alike they are and that they need to work together to lift the curse on the Moor. The immediate kinship Gair feels with Gerald, a melancholic Giant, and Hafny, an open-minded Dorig, represents a gradual breaking of barriers in the divided world of the novel. 

I was both impressed and delighted with the way Jones establishes the ​‘other’ in the story, to create three seemingly distinct groups. Her flawed, intensely real characters made me follow their lives with breathless interest and pause and think over their actions. 

Using magic and humour, Power of Three effortlessly incorporates the idea of the natural world as a shared resource that needs the combined efforts of all its inhabitants to save it. It showed me that stories that deal with topics like the stewardship of nature can indeed be exuberantly silly and subtly magical.