The Monster in the Lake

Louie Stowell's The Monster in the Lake is a magical adventure for 7 year olds about a trainee wizard whose spells have started going badly wrong.

What happens

Kit Spencer is practising a fireball in the Book Wood, the secret forest hidden under her local library. It's going well. Then it shoots up and explodes like a firework. (She'd very much like everyone to know that wasn't her fault.)

Out in the park, things get even stranger. Kit and her best friends, Alita and Josh, can suddenly understand what the animals are saying. A German shepherd is thrilled to find some goose poo. A collie really, really wants bacon. The crows are calling each other rude names.

Back at the library, Dogon, the little half-dog, half-dragon, has gone flaky and floppy and won't stop sleeping. Something is pouring wild magic into the park. With help from Faith, the librarian, the friends track it down to the lake.

What they find isn't scary at all. It's Lizzie, a shy loch creature from Scotland (never, ever call her a Lesser Nessie). A gang of mermaids have thrown her out of her own loch, and she's so sad that her magic is making everything go haywire. Poor Lizzie!

So it's off to Scotland to talk to the mermaids, who apparently pinch, bite and pee. They travel the wizard way, through a portal book that drops them inside a computer, complete with a robot butler who makes toast.

The jokes are everywhere. Kit thinks "posterity" might have something to do with your bottom. Faith naps through boring meetings in sunglasses so nobody can tell. Alita somehow eats mango while reading without getting a single drop on her dress.

And it's a brilliant book for children who love books, because books ARE the magic here. The trees in the Book Wood grow from old books. Draca, the dragon asleep under the library, dreams up whole worlds from the stories people read to her.

What to read next

If they're hooked on Kit and her friends, there's more of them in The Wizard in the Wood, where Faith grows Kit her very own portal book on a tree.