Witches of Peculiar – Double, Double, Twins and Trouble

Luna Graves's Double, Double, Twins and Trouble is a spooky, funny witch-school story for 9 year olds about twin sisters who flood their new school on the very first morning.

What happens

It's the first Witches of Peculiar book. Bella and Dee Maleficent have just come into their powers, and it's their first day at YIKESSS, a school for supernatural students hidden in the town of Peculiar, Pennsylvania.

It goes wrong within the hour. Dee sets their desk on fire in Spell Casting. Bella puts it out by summoning a storm cloud all the way from Seattle and floods the whole ground floor.

The head is a seven-foot harpy with a four-eyed crow that tells her everything. The twins get banned from doing magic at school for two weeks. And the town's Creepy Council has already warned them that one more slip-up could mean the whole family has to leave Peculiar.

Then Bella touches something she really shouldn't in a friend's basement, and brings a dead cat back to life. It runs off. It belongs to the human mayor. Oops!

It's a lot spookier on paper than it feels to read. There's a taxidermy lab, a jar of pickled fingers and that cat on an operating table, but it's all played for laughs (the cat mostly just stretches). A reader who's sensitive about pets dying might want to know it's coming.

The twins are what make it. Bella is five minutes older, bossy, brave and convinced she's always right. Dee is a softie who loves cats and secretly rather likes humans. They squabble constantly, and they'd do anything for each other. Sound familiar?

Their new friends are great fun too. Eugene is a goblin inventor with a jetpack powered by whoopie cushions. Charlie is a nervous vampire who thinks blood is way too sweet and faints at the slightest surprise.

And there's a lovely family underneath it all. Their dads are a ghost and a werewolf, and they pack notes in the lunch boxes that say "Knock 'em dead! But not literally!"

What to read next

For another witch whose first days at witch school go spectacularly wrong, try You Can't Make Me Go To Witch School. Daisy Wart is left at Toadspit Towers on her eleventh birthday, and the gargoyle on the door knocker gnashes its teeth.