Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones is frequently recommended as a young adult fantasy author that someone who enjoys Harry Potter should read, so I randomly picked Howl's Moving Castle as my jumping off book.

SPOILERS ARE COMING PEOPLE. This book was published 30 years ago, so DEAL WITH IT.

It had a promising beginning. We're in a world where magic happens and is accepted. We get the idea that our main character, Sophie, can do magic, but she doesn't know she can. And there's a witch who gets jealous of her (?) and casts a spell on Sophie to make her an old woman and as an old woman Sophie starts work as a housekeeper for the Wizard Howl. I like this world and I'm all ready for a good time.  But, if I'm being 100% honest with you, this is where the basic plot of the book breaks down for me. Sophie's trying to get help to break the curse she's under by helping a demon (?) who lives with Howl break his contract with the wizard and there's a lost a prince and fighting and Howl is seducing women and Sophie's kind of scared of him and they fight all the time and Sophie's sisters are switching places with one another and I was like ?????? for huge sections of the book. And then there's a brief three pages of explanation that I had to read like five times to figure out AND then I consulted Wikipedia to make sure I hadn't lost my damn mind.

So I liked this book until page 62 or so is what I'm saying.

If I had read this as a young adult, I think I'd have 1) died of boredom of Sophie constantly darning clothing and 2) been confused as anything because the abbreviated exposition at the end of the novel was simultaneously too short and too convoluted.

There's a quote from Publisher's Weekly on the back of my library copy that reads "Thoroughly enjoyable - a wonderful blend of humor, magic, and romance" and I spent the first 99% of the novel attempting to figure out if PW meant that "romance" metaphorically or in a Capital R Romantic way. Then Sophie and Howl get together in the last two pages and HOW? WHY? They sniped and bickered the from page 56 until the last word of the novel and this is not how we want young people to think relationships work. If not for this end scene in which these two get together, I would have just thrown the book across the room and decided Jones is not the author for me, but instead I threw the book across the room IN ABSOLUTE DISGUST and proceeded to vomit out hundreds of words about how upsetting the book was.

Upsetting and weird. 

So, any Jones fans out there? Can you tell me what I'm missing here?