I like when books for children accept that they can use words children won’t necessarily understand and may have to look up

I am not sure how I feel about it when the book breaks the fourth wall to address it

My first encounter with the word “necromancer” was in reading the book “Bedknob and Broomstick” (which the movie was based on) as a child in the 80’s or 90’s.

I might be remembering this wrong because it was a very long time ago. But from what I remember, this book is extremely different from the movie in several ways.

Some were terribly problematic. Like, the island was full of native cannibals instead of anthropomorphic animals. As a kid who’d already read a lot of old, racist, sexist books and discussed them with my parents, I knew the drill for reading something like that. (Old book, times change, doesn’t make it okay, but also doesn’t mean you have to throw away the whole book, you can read it and see if you like any of the rest of it and it’s not going to turn you into an evil bigot as long as you understand those parts in the context of present-day ethics, etc.)

And I am not sure what I ended up thinking of the rest of it. I never re-read it, I know that. But I remember some other parts were just vastly different.

The magician who was a contemporary con-man in the movie was a medieval necromancer in the book, and the rest of the characters met him by traveling back in time. There was a witch trial and everything.

But when the word “necromancer” first came up, I remember the book said something like: “Here’s a break in the story for you to ask what a necromancer is. Now you know.”

Even as a child I found it somewhat strange that the book assumed that either 1. I was being read aloud to by someone who would know what a necromancer was, or 2. I was guaranteed to have access to someone in the house that I could get up and ask, get a correct answer on what a necromancer is, and then go back to reading the book.

I was not being read to aloud, and I don’t remember who else was in the house at the time, but I remember that I found it more expedient to go open the dictionary and look up the word.

And I remember that the dictionary told me that necromancers were magicians who used dead bodies to predict the future. And the character in the story was mainly interested in predicting the future, so this made sense.

I think I may have already been aware of the ancient Greek practice of divining the future from the entrails of dead animals, because I remember the word ended up very much tied to that in my mental database. So I spent most of the rest of my youth convinced that a necromancer was like those oracles in Greek mythology who cut open a dead bird or something and told your fortune from it.

Which confused me when I first started seeing it used to mean someone who reanimates the dead. But I adapted.

Anyway looking on Wikipedia it seems that my dictionary-sourced definition is closer to the original meaning than the common usage is today. So kids currently reading Bedknob and Broomstick – if they’re even being allowed to read it– are gonna get a very different idea of what this guy was up to.

(which will also confuse them when they find that the whole movie subplot about using magic to animate suits of armor to fight the Nazis was 100% added by Disney and there’s like …not actually that much about animating nonliving matter in there.)

(Though I remember there was some, because I do remember noticing the book called it “intrasubstantiary locomotion” instead of “substitutiary locomotion.” But I remember the book also kept the idea of using it for combat to 1 line which the characters were all utterly horrified about.)

Anyway I’m rambling. But my point is, if you want your PDF to look the same on different computers you should embed your fonts, and if you want your book to retain some of the same meaning over time, maybe you should embed some of your definitions.