EDIT: Of all the reviews I've done this is the least liked! There are even books I have got more likes for rating than I got for reviewing this one :) 
 This is the second Chrestomanci book I've read to my daughter Celyn - there seems to be some confusion about the order of the books, but they appear to be self-contained and the order is perhaps unimportant. 
 It's a good book, not a great book. It's the first of the 5 DWJ's books I've read to Celyn not to get a 4 or 5*. 
 It retains many of the excellent things I've come to expect from Diana Wynne Jones - imagination, quality writing, a lively sense of humour. 
 It loses other of the excellent things I've come to expect from DWJ. The book gives us a huge Italian family (feuding with another huge Italian family) and there are just way too many characters to allow the story to settle. The dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters bustle into almost every scene and dilute the connect we're trying to forge with the main character/s. And that's another dilution factor - we bounce around heads more than in other books with less clear delineation. The hero is Tonio (not to be confused with father Antonio) but we also look out of his brother Paolo's eyes and this seems to serve little purpose much of the time. 
 So the weaknesses for me were focus and character. 
 The spells are fun, the spell-singing interesting, the role of the families in the city imaginative. 
 The later scenes are exciting and there's a baddie to rail against, a twist that slowly unravels. It's a good book. 
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