Read The Worst Witch free in the Little Reads app.
The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy is a magical school story for 7 year olds about a girl who can't get anything right.
Mildred Hubble is in her first year at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches. Two days in she crashed her broomstick into the yard wall and snapped it in half. She mended it with glue and sticky-tape. It flies, just not very straight.
She can't get down a corridor without someone yelling at her either. Most nights she's writing lines.
Then comes the kitten presentation. Every girl is handed a sleek black kitten to train on her broomstick. Mildred gets a scruffy tabby with white paws that falls straight off the end of hers.
Her best friend Maud sticks by her whatever happens. Ethel is top of the class and would rather point out what Mildred got wrong this week. When Mildred finally answers back with a spell, she lands herself in something far worse.
If you've got a reader who enjoys watching a good day come apart, there's plenty of it here. Have you ever met a child who ends up at the bottom of every mess without meaning to? That's Mildred. She just wants to get through a potion test without turning invisible by mistake.
The kitten is what makes her so easy to like. She shakes it and threatens to call it Stupid. Then it licks her nose and she's apologising and setting it back on the broom.
Miss Hardbroom is the teacher you really wouldn't want catching you out of bed. She vanishes mid-sentence and answers you from nowhere (which is very unfair when you're halfway through saying something about her).
The school is grey walls, gloomy staircases and a LOT of rules. The telling is very chatty though. You get told Mildred is frightened of the dark, then asked not to pass it on.
It's worth knowing that Ethel's unkindness doesn't stop at teasing. She sets Mildred up to be laughed at in front of the whole school and Mildred takes the blame. Hardly anyone will speak to her for a while. If your reader takes unfairness to heart, that stretch is a hard one. Maud is on her side for nearly all of it.
If Mildred goes down well, A Bad Spell for the Worst Witch is in the library too. It opens with her back at school and absolutely determined to behave. Being kind to a crying new girl undoes that within a minute.
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