Pip and the Wood Witch Curse

Chris Mould's Pip and the Wood Witch Curse is a spooky, snowbound adventure for 8 year olds about an orphan who runs away into a city where children are hunted.

What happens

Pip (Eddie Pipkin when he's in trouble) is ten and small for his age. The man who runs his orphanage has sold him to a sea captain as a cabin boy. On the way to the harbour, tied round the middle like a dog, Pip gets lucky. Old Mister Oakes wobbles off the edge into the water, and Pip simply walks away.

He stows away in a travelling theatre company's carriage, hidden among the masks and swords. Days later the carriages creak through the gates into Hangman's Hollow. It's a walled city locked in a long fight with the dark forest around it.

In the Spindlewood live wood witches, wolves and crows, and they want children. The city's answer is to lock up any child it finds. And Mister Jarvis, a man with a hook for a hand and a crow on his shoulder, sniffs the streets for them every night.

Luckily Pip is grabbed off the snowy street by Sam, a huge, kind innkeeper who's been hiding his own son, Toad, in the attic for years. Soon the two boys are listening through the floorboards and planning to find a little girl who's hiding somewhere in the city on her own.

It's creepy in a delicious, fairy-tale way. The storyteller talks straight to you, a wooden toy soldier's eyes click open in the dark, and the crows gossip and bargain for scraps. Pip and Toad's friendship is lovely, and Sam's breakfast of eggs and ham after all that cold is a real sigh of relief.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a dark book for this shelf. The witches talk about children as food, the city hangs people, and one family's children vanish down a chimney and are never seen again. Pip's grown-ups are drunk and cruel, and nobody finds out what happens to Mister Oakes.

A child who's easily scared at bedtime might want this one in daylight, or with you nearby. But if your reader loves a shiver and a brave underdog, they'll be hooked (and very glad of Sam).

What to read next

For something from Chris Mould that's much less shadowy, The Great Cheese Robbery follows Button, a two-inch ship's boy in a junk shop, whose tiny pirate crew face a hungry spider and a gang of sneaky mice.