The Worst Witch Saves the Day

The Worst Witch Saves the Day by Jill Murphy is a boarding school story with broomsticks for 7 year olds, about a girl determined that this year will go better.

What happens

Mildred Hubble is starting her third year at Miss Cackle's Academy. She has spent the summer on a broomstick course, she has a proficiency certificate and a new broom from her mum, and she clears the school wall without a single wobble. She has decided she is going to be the best witch in the world this term.

She lasts about an hour.

The good news is that Form Three have finally escaped Miss Hardbroom as their form teacher. The new one is Miss Granite, who has a huge cloud of bright orange curls, enormous purple glasses and a collar turned up so high you can barely see her face. Her voice comes out as a squeak. She tells the girls to look up whatever spells take their fancy, then gets out her knitting and leaves them to it.

Every girl in the class thinks this is wonderful. Except Ethel Hallow, who likes rotas and instructions, and who has started to wonder.

Before any of that, though, Mildred gets her friend's styling brush welded into her waist-length hair, and Ethel turns up to help with a pair of scissors.

The haircut is the bit that will land. Mildred's hair comes off in lumps, with bald patches showing, ten minutes before the first assembly of the year. Miss Hardbroom tells her in front of everyone that it serves her right for preening. Maud says it will grow back. Enid says the hacked-off look is fashionable. Mildred sits in the yard with her shoulders up round her ears and cannot think about anything else all day.

If you've got a reader who has ever been mortified in front of a whole school, that feeling is what this book is built on. Mildred tries hard, means well, and it goes wrong anyway, usually while everybody watches.

There is comfort in it too. Maud stays loyal through everything. Tabby, the only tabby in a school of regulation black cats, flattens himself on the back of the broom because he hates flying and Mildred loves him for it. Six bats hang along the picture rail and come home at dawn.

Ethel deserves a word of warning. She is unkind, then genuinely sorry, then unkind again, and Mildred falls for it every single time. Children who have a friend like that will recognise her instantly.

What to read next

If they like the idea of a school where the broom lessons matter more than maths, try Diary of an Accidental Witch. Bea has just moved to a town where it snows in sunshine, the pet shop sells owls and frogs, and her dad signs her up to the wrong academy entirely.