The Witch’s Glass

Holly Grant's The Witch's Glass is a darkly funny fantasy for 10 year olds about a girl who finally turns into a bat and finds she can't fly.

What happens

Anastasia McCrumpet always thought she was completely ordinary. She isn't. She's half Morfo, one of the shape-shifting folk who live in a secret underground town called Nowhere Special. She's also, it turns out, a princess.

This book picks up a few months after the Dreadfuls' first adventure. Anastasia now lives in a palace on an underground lagoon and goes to school by gondola. Her first morph goes about as badly as it possibly could. She wakes up a bat, can't get off the floor, and turns back into a girl with a big bushy moustache (it falls out by teatime, apparently).

Her dad is still missing. The one person who could find him is her grandpa Nicodemus, who's trapped in a magic chest. And the only thing that can open that chest is a silver hammer, sealed inside a glass cabinet in an old wizard's secret study.

So Anastasia and her friends start sneaking off during school rowing lessons to work on it. There's Ollie with his secret stash of toffee bars, his brother Quentin, and Gus, a gorgon boy with snakes for hair under his school wig.

What makes it so much fun is the voice telling the story. It talks straight to "dear Reader", warns you never to get into a pink station wagon and explains the long words with a wink. There are brilliant made-up details everywhere, like a headmistress who gives detention to any pupil who dies during school hours.

There's a dark streak under the jokes, though. A secret society called CRUD kidnaps children like Anastasia and wants them gone for good, and the narrator calls one kidnapper a murderess. Gus also tells his friends, in just a few lines, that his grandmother was burned at the stake long ago.

For most 10 year olds that will sit comfortably inside the silliness. A more sensitive reader might want to know it's coming.

If your reader likes a narrator who's in on the joke, they'll feel right at home here.

What to read next

The story follows straight on from The League of Beastly Dreadfuls, so start there if you can. That's where Anastasia's very ordinary life ends with a funeral for her dad's Venus flytrap and a ride in the wrong car.