Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones Review: A Spirited Arabian Nights Fantasy Sequel

Castle in the Air, first published in 1990, is the second book in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Castle trilogy (also known as the Lands of Ingary series). Where Howl's Moving Castle centered on Sophie Hatter, this sequel shifts the spotlight to Abdullah, a young rug merchant from the desert city of Zanzib who sustains himself with elaborate daydreams about being a lost prince. A mysterious stranger sells him a threadbare but magical carpet, which begins transporting Abdullah in his sleep to a beautiful garden — and to Princess Flower-in-the-Night, a young woman as well-read as she is sheltered, who becomes his true love and, quickly, the impetus for his entire quest. A wicked djinn — aided by his more benevolent but enthralled brother — has captured more than a hundred princesses with the aim of marrying them all, and Abdullah's dreams and nightmares begin colliding with waking reality as he sets out to rescue her. The quest moves from the deserts of Zanzib through the Britain-like kingdom of Ingary and ultimately up to the sky-high castle where the djinn holds his captives.

Jones structured this sequel as a deliberate riff on One Thousand and One Nights, giving the book a distinctly different texture from the English-folklore atmosphere of Howl's Moving Castle. Abdullah travels with a comically cranky genie, rides a lazy magic carpet, and navigates a world of disguises and wishes gone sideways — all familiar furniture from the Arabian tradition, recast with Jones's signature wit. This dual-world design — Zanzib's desert culture rubbing up against Ingary's fairy-tale Europe — gives the novel a broader geographical and tonal canvas than its predecessor. Fans of the first book encounter returning characters from Howl's Moving Castle, though many appear in disguise, which Jones uses as both a plot mechanism and a running source of comedy.

Kirkus Reviews, in its assessment of the novel, singled out Jones's talent for giving personality to everything — noting that she provides what it called "delicious personalities even for the carpet (it's lazy but susceptible to flattery)." That same review praised the double identities woven through the plot as the kind of twists likely to "surprise even fans familiar with her bottomless bag of tricks." One reader, writing from Vienna, described Jones's prose style as hitting a precise register: writing in a way that "never talks down to her readers" while never showing off either — a balance that distinguishes Jones's voice in the young adult space. Princess Flower-in-the-Night, for her part, is characterized not just as a romantic prize but as a formidably educated young woman whose knowledge comes entirely from books — a detail that Jones uses for both humor and genuine character depth.

Because Castle in the Air follows a new protagonist rather than continuing Sophie's story directly, it functions with a degree of independence from Howl's Moving Castle — readers unfamiliar with every detail of the first book can follow Abdullah's journey on its own terms. That said, the novel rewards those who come to it with knowledge of the first book: the returning characters carry more weight, and the disguises land with greater force when the reader knows who is hiding beneath them. Critics described Howl's Moving Castle as "ebulliently inventive," and Castle in the Air inherits that inventive energy while charting its own mythological course. The audiobook edition, published by Recorded Books on April 20, 2009, runs seven hours and fifty-nine minutes and is narrated by Jenny Sterlin in an unabridged version.

Readers who loved Sophie Hatter as a protagonist may need a moment to adjust to Abdullah — his starting point as a daydreaming, somewhat passive young man is a deliberate character design, but it places the early chapters in a lower gear than Sophie's brisk, sardonic opening. The Arabian Nights framework, while fresh, also means the novel leans into a broader ensemble of wishes, djinns, and magical objects that some readers find more diffuse than the focused invention of the first book. Those who embrace the shift, however, will find a fantasy novel dense with moving parts, jokes that pay off chapters later, and the kind of structural cleverness that Jones's admirers consistently prize. Young adult fantasy readers drawn to myth-remix storytelling and ensemble casts — rather than a single tightly focused hero's arc — are the audience this book is most squarely designed for.