The Spell Tailors

James Nicol's The Spell Tailors is a cosy magical mystery for 9 year olds about a boy whose family has been stitching spells into clothes for nearly 400 years.

What happens

Hen lives above Danelli's, the family shop in Sparrow Down, with his Nana. Spell tailors don't just make clothes. They sew magic into them, using stitches from a precious cloth book handed down through every generation.

A travelling jacket can keep you the perfect temperature (and work as a life jacket if you fall in a river). Pyjamas can stay toasty warm all night. Hen has just been trusted with his first order for a real customer, and he's hoping to enter something for the Guild Fair.

Then the relatives turn up. Uncle Bertie, Aunt Lucia and cousin Connie arrive on a Wednesday afternoon with a pile of suitcases. It soon comes out that they've lost their shops and their big house, and now everyone's going to live and work at Danelli's. Business is bad. A factory churning out cheaper spelled clothes is taking customers, and people are whispering that spelled garments are making folk ill.

Connie is a snob, at first. She sniffs at the small park, the greasy garage and everyone Hen stops to say hello to. But she's also frightened, and she's right that the grown-ups aren't telling the whole truth. Why does Uncle Bertie suddenly need a list of every single thing in the building?

It's got such a lovely, cosy feel. There's Marjorie the shleep, who hangs from a beam in the workroom, snores for about twenty-three and a half hours a day and grows the family's yarn. There's Nana's never-ending red scarves and Mrs Ele's shortbread in the park. And underneath it all is a worry lots of children will recognise, that money's tight and nobody will say so out loud.

The magic part of the mystery comes when Hen finds a stitch that stores memories inside a seam. He thinks it might save the shop. Instead he's banned from sewing altogether, and there's a puzzle to unpick.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, The Apprentice Witch is another James Nicol story, about a young witch dreading the test that decides her whole future.