A hat full of sky

Review by Booklist Review

Gr. 6-10. Incipient witch Tiffany Aching, who confronted danger in The Wee Free Men (2003), faces even greater peril in this equally quirky sequel. She is taken on as an apprentice witch by Miss Level, who is one person with two bodies--an oddity to say the least. Also, Tiffany is stalked and taken over by a hiver, an invisible, brainless entity that commands and distorts the mind of its host, which eventually dies. Luckily Tiffany is strong enough to hide a section of her mind within herself, but she is otherwise completely under the control of the hiver. It's the cantankerous Wee Free Men (or the Nac Mac Feegle) to the rescue, with the help of Miss Level and the wisest, most respected witch of all. The chase is part slapstick, part terror, and in the end, Tiffany herself sets things straight. Pratchett maintains the momentum of the first book, and fans will relish the further adventures of the big wee hag, as Tiffany is known to the Feegles. --Sally Estes Copyright 2004 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Terry Pratchett follows up his The Wee Free Men (which PW called "an enthralling and rewarding read" in a starred review) with A Hat Full of Sky, starring the young witch Tiffany Aching. Tiffany leaves home and the little blue Nac Mac Feegle to apprentice for Miss Level. Meanwhile, Tiffany, some powerful witches and the little blue fairies must defeat the hiver that stalks her. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-8-This fantasy continues the story begun in The Wee Free Men (HarperCollins, 2003), in which Tiffany Aching, then age nine, defeated the evil Queen of the Fairies. Now 11, she is beginning her apprenticeship as a witch, as her grandmother was before her. The Wee Free Men have vowed to protect her always. Tiffany's power is untrained and she has accidentally learned how to project herself out of her body or "borrow" herself. This allows a type of demon, a hiver, to take over her mind and destroy it little by little. While she is under its influence, she isn't herself and treats others badly, especially the clique of apprentice witches who have made fun of her. When the Wee Free Men are able to free her, Tiffany banishes the hiver into the next world where Death awaits. With the help of her teacher, who is actually a person with two bodies; wise head witch Granny Weatherwax; an obsessively tidy ghost named Oswald; Toad, a former human lawyer; and Rob Anybody, husband of the current Queen of the Wee Free Men, she learns to find her own magic. This book is full of irreverent humor, laugh-out-loud dialogue, and many memorable characters. A glossary is provided to help decipher the Wee Free Men's Scottish brogue. Fans of the previous book are in for another treat.-Sharon Rawlins, Piscataway Public Library, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Horn Book Review

(Middle School, High School) In this sequel to The Wee Free Men (rev. 5/03), Pratchett approaches an even more perfect union of domestic and epic fantasy, and the humor similarly races from cerebral to burlesque without dropping a stitch. Gratefully relinquishing her temporary appointment as kelda to the Nac Mac Feegle, Tiffany Aching is apprenticed to Miss Level, a witch of the humbler sort whose singular characteristic is her identity as one person distributed between two bodies: ""My right body is slightly clumsier than my left body, but I have better eyesight in my right pair of eyes. I'm human, just like you, except that there's more of me."" Tiffany's witch lessons with Miss Level, and her encounters with a neighboring teen-queen apprentice, have the kind of magic school humor beloved to fans of Harry P., but they also brilliantly lighten the more serious story of Tiffany's relentless pursuit by a soul-stealing hiver. ""We see you. Now we are you,"" says the hiver as it takes Tiffany over; and all the boisterous force of the Nac Mac Feegle, as well as all the power of Granny Aching's sheep-dappled landscape, the Chalk, will be needed to bring Tiffany back to herself. Pratchett recalls his elders Garner and Mayne in his evocation--and invocation--of the English Chalk, and Tiffany as its personification. ""She tells the hills what they are, every day. She has them in her bones. She holds 'em in her heart,"" says Feegle Rob Anybody, and it's more than poetry, it's the life of this astonishing novel. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Tiffany Aching and her loyal friends, the crazed six-inch Nac Mac Feegle, return in an outing rather less uproarious but more weighty, and thereby possibly more satisfying, than The Wee Free Men (2003). Tiffany, now 11, has left the Chalk to apprentice to a career witch. On the brink of adolescence, she has become more conscious of image, and it is this weakness that leaves her open to attack by a hiver, a parasite that seeks out the powerful, taking over their minds--and killing them in the process. It's the Feegles to the rescue, a highly dubious enterprise. Pratchett weaves a tale that isn't afraid to detour into biting satire or to stop and admire a mot particularly juste, but that keeps returning to the critical question of identity--how an individual must embrace her worst aspects to become her best self, how worth is found in works, not in posturing. The great chalk horse cut into the downlands becomes the metaphor for Tiffany's understanding of this: "Taint what a horse looks like. It's what a horse be." By turns hilarious and achingly beautiful, this be just right. (Fiction. 12+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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A Hat Full of Sky Chapter One Leaving It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog. Movement without a body tired it, and it drifted very slowly. It wasn't thinking now. It had been months since it had last thought, because the brain that was doing the thinking for it had died. They always died. So now it was naked again, and frightened. It could hide in one of the blobby white creatures that baa'd nervously as it crawled over the turf. But they had useless brains, capable of thinking only about grass and making other things that went baa. No. They would not do. It needed, needed something better, a strong mind, a mind with power, a mind that could keep it safe. It searched. . . . The new boots were all wrong. They were stiff and shiny. Shiny boots! That was disgraceful. Clean boots, that was different. There was nothing wrong with putting a bit of a polish on boots to keep the wet out. But boots had to work for a living. They shouldn't shine. Tiffany Aching, standing on the rug in her bedroom, shook her head. She'd have to scuff the things as soon as possible. Then there was the new straw hat, with a ribbon on it. She had some doubts about that, too. She tried to look at herself in the mirror, which wasn't easy because the mirror was not much bigger than her hand, and cracked and blotchy. She had to move it around to try and see as much of herself as possible and remember how the bits fitted together. But today . . . well, she didn't usually do this sort of thing in the house, but it was important to look smart today, and since no one was around . . . She put the mirror down on the rickety table by the bed, stood in the middle of the threadbare rug, shut her eyes, and said: "See me." And away on the hills something, a thing with no body and no mind but a terrible hunger and a bottomless fear, felt the power. It would have sniffed the air if it had a nose. It searched. It found. Such a strange mind, like a lot of minds inside one another, getting smaller and smaller! So strong! So close! It changed direction slightly and went a little faster. As it moved, it made a noise like a swarm of flies. The sheep, nervous for a moment about something they couldn't see or smell, baa'd . . . . . . and went back to chewing grass. Tiffany opened her eyes. There she was, a few feet away from herself. She could see the back of her own head. Carefully, she moved around the room, not looking down at the "her" that was moving, because she found that if she did that, then the trick was over. It was quite difficult, moving like that, but at last she was in front of herself and looking herself up and down. Brown hair to match brown eyes . . . well, there was nothing she could do about that. At least her hair was clean and she'd washed her face. She had a new dress on, which improved things a bit. It was so unusual to buy new clothes in the Aching family that, of course, it was bought big so that she'd "grow into it." But at least it was pale green, and it didn't actually touch the floor. With the shiny new boots and the straw hat she looked . . . like a farmer's daughter, quite respectable, going off to her first job. It'd have to do. From here she could see the pointy hat on her head, but she had to look hard for it. It was like a glint in the air, gone as soon as you saw it. That's why she'd been worried about the new straw hat, but it had simply gone through the pointy hat as if it wasn't there. This was because, in a way, it wasn't. It was invisible, except in the rain. Sun and wind went straight through, but rain and snow somehow saw it, and treated it as if it was real. She'd been given it by the greatest witch in the world, a real witch with a black dress and a black hat and eyes that could go through you like turpentine goes through a sick sheep. It had been a kind of reward. Tiffany had done magic, serious magic. Before she had done it she hadn't known that she could, when she had been doing it she hadn't known that she was, and after she had done it she hadn't known how she had. Now she had to learn how. "See me not," she said. The vision of her -- or whatever it was, because she was not exactly sure about this trick -- vanished. It had been a shock, the first time she'd done this. But she'd always found it easy to see herself, at least in her head. All her memories were like little pictures of herself doing things or watching things, rather than the view from the two holes in the front of her head. There was a part of her that was always watching her. Miss Tick -- another witch, but one who was easier to talk to than the witch who'd given Tiffany the hat -- had said that a witch had to know how to "stand apart," and that she'd find out more when her talent grew, so Tiffany supposed the "see me" was part of this. Sometimes Tiffany thought she ought to talk to Miss Tick about "see me." It felt as if she was stepping out of her body but still had a sort of ghost body that could walk around. It all worked as long as her ghost eyes didn't look down and see that she was just a ghost body. If that happened, some part of her panicked and she found herself back in her solid body immediately. Tiffany had, in the end, decided to keep this to herself. You didn't have to tell a teacher everything. Anyway, it was a good trick for when you didn't have a mirror. A Hat Full of Sky . Copyright © by Terry Pratchett. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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