The witches and wizards of Witchville are not acting like themeselves -- they are bickering and fighting with one another. Dorrie learns the cause and attempts to save the day. ( )

It feels distinctly blasphemous to even consider the idea... but I didn't really like this nineteenth entry in Patricia Coombs' twenty-book series about Dorrie, a little witch whose stockings were always mismatched, and whose hat was always on crooked. Judged on its own merits, it's probably a three-star book (hence, my rating), suitable for young readers with a taste for witchy tales. But as a Dorrie book, part of the same collection containing such childhood favorites as Dorrie and the Blue Witch, or Dorrie and the Weather Box? It simply didn't measure up.

The narrative itself, in which Dorrie must face off against the Pin Witch - yet another magical practitioner intent on harming the ever-oblivious adult residents of Witchville - isn't such a departure from the previous books in the series, although I felt the text was somewhat more slight (I'll have to compare this with one of the early titles, to be sure). No, the real problem here is Coombs' artwork, which is in an entirely different style than the previous eighteen books. It isn't just that these "Dorrie" illustrations are in full-color, whereas the earlier ones were mostly black-and-white, with limited color accents - although that's bad enough - but that the overall quality of the art itself is lower, with blurrier images, and a young heroine whose emotional register (visually speaking) is far less appealing.

Somehow, all the magic of the earlier titles has gone missing! The scene in which all the witches are streaming through the air, toward the Witchville tower, ought to have been enchanting, but is marred by the smudgy appearance of each individual figure. All the sharp crispness of Coombs' earlier style has been sacrificed for color, robbing these pages of a great deal of expressiveness, particularly as it concerns Dorrie's facial expressions. The impact of a more sparing and judicious use of color - as seen in previous titles - is also missing here, with little of that sense of contrast that made certain scenes in the earlier titles far more dramatic.

I feel like a bit of a Grinch writing this review, since Dorrie and the Pin Witch really isn't such a terrible book. Unfortunately, it isn't just any book, but a Dorrie book, which sets up sky-high expectations. Expectations that it does not meet... ( )