Mischief Season

John Bemelmans Marciano's Mischief Season is a funny, spooky story for 8 year olds about a girl who blames everything on the witches, until the witches start blaming her back.

What happens

Rosa lives on a farm outside Benevento, down in the south of Italy, in the 1820s. She's always starving, so when a whole cheese vanishes overnight she has the perfect excuse. A Janara did it!

Janara are the local witches. They blow in through the keyhole at night and get up to all sorts of mischief. So Rosa blames them for everything, and her father has had quite enough.

Then things start going wrong for real. Rosa wakes up with a sore tummy and an itchy nose, as if something has been sucking the food out of her through a straw. Tools end up scattered, every tile vanishes off the barn roof and the honey pot fills with bees. And guess who gets the blame?

Her twin brother Emilio is the thinker. He puts out little bags of salt, because every Janara has to stop and count each grain. The cousins pay a sour old fortune-teller for spells that only make things worse (one needs a blade of grass rubbed on a frog's back). There's even a midnight hike to find the witches' tree.

It's such a fun read. The kids bicker nonstop and call each other donkey-brains. They race past the Clopper, a witch with one wooden clog who runs after any child crossing her square. You get the whole town's beliefs too, from spitting at the city gate to singing la-la-la on the bridge so the Manalonga can't get you.

It's set a long time ago, and Rosa does get a spanking from her father at one point, which might need a word. The creatures are more mischievous than scary, although a voice under the bridge does try to lure Emilio in.

At the back there's a little dictionary of all the town's witches, plus a page on how children lived back then.

What to read next

If your reader likes their magic with plenty of family squabbling, try The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop next. It has another brother and sister who are twins, and a very strange old shop.