Love Diana Wynne Jones, and a bad DWJ is still better than a poke in the eye, but this wasn't her best work. Still filled with fun stuff - I absolutely love the apologetic elephant and the cantankerous goat, the canyon world is brill and I really like Roddy and Nick and Grundo a lot. But the plot rambles about a bit and some things are more worked out than others. If she'd taken some time to polish this up it could have been about nine times better. Sometimes her stuff reads a little bit like a potboiler that she knocked out because she had some bills to pay. However, no reason DWJ shouldn't pay her bills and even when she's not fully up to her top standard, she's still fun.
