A Jungle of Tales

              This book pulls the difficult trick of starting at the end without, somehow, giving too much away beyond the fact that teenage twins Mae and Rossa survived some kind of fire-related disaster, and that two (or possibly three) other people went missing: “While the papers flooded with tributes, it seemed to Mae that nobody remembered that Bevan and Rita had kept themselves to themselves…Rita was kind and Bevan was beautiful – this is what remained. This and the smell. They talked about it for years…Great billows of it carried on the wind down over the village and the motorway: smoke, sweet and dark.”             Mae and her twin brother first visit the house on Iona Crescent inhabited by their great-aunt Rita, when they are fourteen – dumped there by parents trying to deal with their failing marriage. Mae is enchanted by Rita’s pretty teenage neighbor Bevan (who she develops her first serious crush on) and by the fact that the two appear to be witches:

  This is one of the Discworld books that functions particularly well as a stand-alone. It’s main connection to the rest of the series is to dive deep into how gods in this world work and how the Omnians – implied to have quite a bloody history of forced conversions and witchhunting – ended up mainly just annoying people with pamphlets. Anyone reading this book (or, say, ‘Good Omens’) could probably guess that Pratchett was an atheist. But, interestingly, he seems to have had quite a lot of respect for genuine heartfelt faith, especially of the sort that moves people to be good to others. He saves his sharpest barbs for those whose belief is rigid and turned inward, leading to unwillingness to listen to anyone else, or who use other’s faith to control them.   This story follows Brutha – an earnest young Omnian novice who is probably dyslexic but who has a photographic memory – and his god Om. Who is currently in the form of a one-eyed tortoise after his attempt a