A great read

I came very late to DWJ but am making up for lost time. The Dalemark Quartet is a fabulous series. There are 4 different stories, and it's difficult at times to see how they are all linked together, but all is revealed before the end (which came all to soon for me).

The series starts with The Cart and the Cwidder, in which we meet the singers, a group of travelling people who go across Dalemark with songs and news (and sometimes other things as well).
The second book is about Mitt and the injustices he faces, growing up where the Lord takes more and more each year, leaving him and his family no choice but to leave the land and go and try and make a living in the city. Mitt gets involved with the freedom fighters and has to leave Holand in a rush.
The Spellcoats is set many years earlier than the other 3 books, but some things become clearer once this book has been read.
The final book sees Maewin leaving modern Dalemark and going back 200 years, to the time of Mitt. I was very sorry when the series came to an end as I wanted to find out more about the characters.

The narration for these books was completed by 4 different people, which was a bit of a shame. They were all good, but one voice throughout would have been better, and make for consistency with accents and pronunciation.

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Good book

I love the book series and Diana Wynne Jones is an amazing writer. It is read very well and there is never a dull moment

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Bizarre and Brilliant

I listened to this as an adult rediscovering my love of DWJ and didn't want it to end! The story spans 3 different periods in history and many different complex and bizarre strands of story following a big cast of characters but somehow DWJ manages to pull it all together and make you truly connect with the characters. The narration was good, in particular Ursula Jones was brilliant.

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6 people found this helpful

Excellent compilation of the Dalemark Quarter

The Dalemark quartet is one of Diana Wynne Jones best series of books. The narrator does justice to the books and the time simply flies by.

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Thoroughly Enjoyed This Piece of Excellent Storytelling

When I reached the end of the four books, I found myself wishing it was a quintet rather than a quartet.

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Magical story magically read

Diana Wynne Jones is a born storyteller. Her tales are complex, exciting, compassionate and tough. Your own imagination completes the picture. The narrators of these chronicles make the characters come alive. I thoroughly recommend the stories and the narrators.

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Magical stories, beautifully read

These four stories by DWJ are wonderful and magical and often very witty (although not much wit in C&C). Some themes are quite dark and shocking events do occur in the stories. Drowned Ammet and Spellcoats are especially well-read by their narrators. In particular, Ursula Jones' narration of Spellcoats is luminous. Cart and Cwidder took a little bit of getting into, but once the first shocking event occurs, it moves faster.
Drowned Ammet and Spellcoats are the best, and both brilliant in different ways. Drowned Ammet is wonderful for exploring themes of injustice, what it means to be a person fighting a good cause for the wrong reasons and in a totally hapless fashion. It also explores the dynamic between three children/teenagers, two of whom come from a completely different world from the other, and the clashes and tensions which accompany this.
Spellcoats is a wonderful mystical story with fun down-to-earth observations of sibling relationships (the characters of Tannaqui and Duck/Mallard are delightfully stubborn and funny). I found Crown of Dalemark to be a bit of a let-down. The story is not as strong and although the narrator is good, this volume is preceded by the superlative narration of Ursula Jones, which means that the contrast is slightly jarring. However, after a while it becomes very enjoyable to listen to and the character developments of Mitt and Maewyn hold the story together.
Overall I could not recommend the volumes more highly, definitely worth listening to!

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Brilliant stories - one narrator not so good...

These are wonderful stories and brilliantly written by Diana Wynne Jones who I have just reconnected with, having read a couple of her books as a child.
I would highly recommend with a couple of caveats, the narration in The Crown of Dalemark was not up to the standard of the other books, which are wonderfully and lovingly characterised; it feels somehow careless and rushed and doesn't convey the sense and feel of the language as well as the other narrators. Mike Grady does an absolutely superb job on Drowned Ammet. There are several characters that span across Cart and Cwidder, Drowned Ammet and The Crown of Dalemark and unfortunately there is a lack of continuity in the characterisation, pronunciation of names (place and character), and accents, which is a shame and becomes jarring if you are listening to them as a set.

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2 people found this helpful

Loved it.

Not sure about the pronunciation of some names, but story &characters so brilliant. Gorgeous.

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Disappointing narration and characterisation

I’ve read and loved the Dalemark stories and was looking forward to listening to them, but had to give up on both Cart and Cwidder and The Crown of Dalemark because the narration was so irritating, particularly the awful squeaky ‘suthun’ and ‘narthern’ accents given to the characters, which the narrators struggled so hard to keep up, regardless of circumstance, that all emotional nuance was lost.

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1 person found this helpful