Hexwood

by Diana Wynne Jones

Greenwillow, 2002 [1993], ISBN 0-06-447355-4

A book review by Elisabeth Carey

Ann Stavely is a girl in England, who watches the gate of the Hexwood Farm housing estate from her bedroom window, and sees people enter and not return. Vierran is a young woman of a very different, and distant world, who's about to be dragged off by Reigner One, senior of the five rulers of her world, on a mission to a small world which is the source of the most valuable substance in existence, flint--a mission on which three of the five other reigners have already gone, and from which they have unaccountably not returned.

And Mordion is either the sinister servant of the not at all beneficient Reigners, or a conspirator against them who has been locked up in a stasis box on Hexwood Farm for several centuries. And while all the humans are pursuing their assorted and conflictin g purposes, the computer and the Wood are each plotting their own plots.

Nicely convoluted and absorbing, but not completely satisfying, in the end.

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