Clumsy witch

Clumsy witch

Jill Murphy: The Worst Witch (first published by Allison & Bushby in 1974)

Future witches study at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches. Outside, gloomy gray walls and towers rise to the sky, and inside there are long narrow corridors running between the staircases and the sunlight almost never gets in. The girls who study here also wear black uniforms, capes and peaked caps. Mildred Hubble is the clumsiest among them. What she is doing usually goes wrong. If she accidentally succeeds with a spell, she will cause trouble with that as well. In the novel, we can follow her adventures with her best friend Maud Spellbody and the snooty know-it-all Ethel Hallow within the enchanted walls of the school.

The novel is short, but very fast-paced and exciting, despite the fact that it does not resemble today’s action-packed adventure novels but is much cuter. We don’t have to worry about who will die, but instead we can expect a pleasant and funny time.

Jill Murphy has been writing and drawing books since she was 6 years old. She is best known for The Worst Witch series, which she wrote between 1974 and 2018 and 8 volumes of it were published. She won numerous awards, mainly with the Large Family picture books, but her other writings and drawings were also published. The first volume of The Worst Witch was published in Hungarian this year, and the second book is already about to hit store shelves this week. I hope that we don’t have to wait long for the others either.