Also reflecting on DWJ’s recurring take/assumption that in the absence of active emotional abuse to prevent it, youngest children in a family group will manifest as unstoppable chaos gremlins of some variety.

A take which finds its fullest expression, of course, in the plot of Archer’s Goon, but probably its purest depiction in The Time of the Ghost with Fenella, who is a world-uprooting feral force while also being a completely mundane human child somewhere between the ages of six and nine.

Ghost is the book Jones described as being closest to autobiographical of her works. (Which honestly explains so much about how she depicts adults.) And this fact has always mocked me with the distinct likelihood that somewhere in the world, when this book came out, there was a grown woman who had to look at her older sister’s body of work and reckon with this reflection of her child self refracted through it.