Mr Majeika and the Dinner Lady

Humphrey Carpenter's Mr Majeika and the Dinner Lady is a set of funny, magical school stories for 6 year olds starring the wizard who teaches Class Three.

What happens

Mr Majeika is a wizard, though nobody outside Class Three knows it. He isn't supposed to do magic now he's a teacher. He sometimes forgets.

In the first story, everyone in Class Three hates school dinners, and they hate Mrs Chipchase the dinner lady even more. She's red in the face, bossy and quick to send people to the head. There's also something fishy going on. Every day Hamish Bigmore, the class nuisance, hands his posh packed lunch to Mrs Chipchase, and every day she gives him a giant bar of chocolate.

Mr Majeika sorts it out in true wizard style. Let's just say a packed lunch full of worms, snails and cockroaches is involved (wizards find them delicious). Then he has to cook the school dinners himself. What could possibly go wrong? Toad-in-the-hole, that's what.

After that there's a class trip to a farm park where the animals look oddly familiar. And there's a school fête where Hamish gets hold of some magic and causes chaos for a very grand visitor.

The stories are short, silly and just the right length for a bedtime chapter. The magic always goes a little bit wrong, which is half the fun. And Hamish Bigmore is a brilliant baddie. He's rude and greedy and always up to something, so it's very satisfying when things backfire on him (though he quite often gets the last laugh).

Twins Thomas and Pete and their friend Jody are good company too. They're the ones who notice what's going on and go to Mr Majeika for help.

This one follows on from earlier run-ins with a nasty witch called Wilhelmina Worlock, and she's back causing trouble here. You don't need to have read the others to enjoy it, though.

What to read next

If your reader loves Mr Majeika, it's great fun to go back to where he started. In the very first Mr Majeika book, he arrives at St Barty's on a magic carpet that flies in through the classroom window, and has to pretend it's a bicycle.