Heidi Heckelbeck 17 – Heidi Heckelbeck Makes a Wish

Wanda Coven's Heidi Heckelbeck Makes a Wish is a magical school story for 6 year olds about a young witch who says something she doesn't mean at exactly the wrong moment.

What happens

Heidi's class is off to the botanical gardens. There's a hedge maze, trees trimmed into animal shapes, rides shaped like fruit and vegetables and ice-cream bars at the end. Then Bruce (who always knows the weather) says it's going to rain.

Heidi isn't having that. She gets out her Book of Spells and finds one called Everyday Wishes. It needs a straw hat, powdered sugar, three lemon gumdrops pinched off an old gingerbread house and a drop of flower dew.

There's no dew on Mum's daisy in the afternoon. So Heidi makes her own with tap water. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot! The storm arrives right in the middle of the maze. Lucy slips in the mud, Bruce's glasses get trodden on and nobody gets their picnic or a single ride.

Back home, soaked and cross with everyone, Heidi grumbles that sometimes she'd rather not be a witch at all. Her spell hat is sitting right in front of her at the time. Soon the words in her Book of Spells are vanishing off the page.

Aunt Trudy is a witch too, so she's the one Heidi runs to. There's only one way to undo it. Heidi has to find three people who make a wish and then grant each one WITHOUT magic.

That's the bit young readers will love. Heidi goes round the playground asking everyone what they'd wish for. She gets a pet panda, a supercomputer and a slide from a bedroom straight into a swimming pool (not much use!). So she starts listening out for the small wishes instead, like a ball stuck on the basketball hoop or a classmate who's muddled by his maths homework.

Heidi is very easy to like. She gets things wrong, she snaps at her little brother Henry and then she feels awful about it. There's a lovely idea underneath all the fun about how much you can do for people just by helping, and it never gets preachy.

This is the seventeenth Heidi book, but the story explains everything a new reader needs to know about her witchy family. It's short and the sentences are simple, so it's a good one for a child reading on their own.

What to read next

If they'd like more of Heidi, Lucy and Bruce, Heidi Heckelbeck and the Big Mix-Up is the next one along, and it starts with Heidi's new jumper.