Whispering to Witches

Anna Dale's Whispering to Witches is a snowy Christmas story for 9 year olds, and it starts with a boy on the wrong train.

What happens

Joe was going to spend Christmas in London with his dad. Then his dad's great-aunt had a fall in Scotland, and by breakfast there was a suitcase on the landing and a plan Joe had no say in.

So he is on a train to Canterbury instead, to his mum, his stepdad Gordon and his little half-sister Esme. He is not thrilled about any of it.

The train journey is the best thing in the book. Joe watches the other passengers because there is nothing else to do. A woman works at a crossword for nearly two hours without filling in a single square. A glamorous woman gets on with a cat basket and red nails and is far too charming. A man in a pinstriped suit shares his sweets and has a tattoo like the letter S.

Then the lights go out. Something hisses inside the crossword woman's handbag. A tongue comes over the clasp, then a smooth head and a pair of green eyes.

Joe bolts on to the platform, and the train pulls away, and the glamorous woman blows him a kiss through the window.

It is the wrong station. He is five miles short, the phone lines are down, the last bus has gone and the ticket collector who took his ticket turns out not to work there at all.

That is the first two chapters and it is genuinely creepy. Not gory, just wrong, in the way a child understands immediately.

What rescues Joe is an orange tricycle from lost property that decides where it is going. It takes him straight through Canterbury and in through a crooked purple door, where he lands under a desk in a room full of witches.

They are not cackling witches. They have notice-boards and pie charts and a pot labelled Pens. One of them has made an aardvark out of paperclips. They bicker like any office.

A couple of things to think about. Joe's parents have split up, his dad puts him on a train at Christmas, and Joe is quietly miserable about it for a good while. For some children that is the most familiar thing in the book and for others it may sting.

The fear on the train is real fear, deliberately, and there is a snake and a cat that draws blood.

If you've got a reader who likes magic tucked into an ordinary English town rather than a school for wizards, this will suit them. Joe himself is twelve, so it reads a little older than it looks.

What to read next

If they enjoy it, we have Anna Dale's Magical Mischief as well. That one has magic that has settled into a bookshop and will not leave.