You Can’t Make Me Go To Witch School!

Em Lynas's You Can't Make Me Go To Witch School is a loud, funny story for 9 year olds told by a girl who is absolutely, definitely NOT a witch.

What happens

It's Daisy Wart's eleventh birthday, and Granny's big treat is to leave her on the doorstep of Toadspit Towers. It's a crumbling school for witches with a gargoyle door knocker that gnashes its teeth. Daisy is a Shakespearean actress, thank you very much. She's due to play Bottom in two sleeps' time, and she wants OUT.

Toadspit Towers has other ideas. The headmistress has been dead for about three hundred years and whizzes round the corridors as a green tornado, tightening ties. The deputy wears pink bunny slippers and insists Daisy has a witch's hat on her head that nobody can quite see yet. The beds are giant cauldrons hanging from the ceiling on chains. And Daisy is booked in until she's eighteen.

So she does what any sensible actress would do. She draws up Great Escape Plans. Plan B is the Great Stink Bomb Plan, where she simply refuses to wash until they let her go.

The whole book is Daisy's voice, and it's a very big voice. She says "ac-chew-ally" and gives people looks from The Book of Looks. She shouts in CAPITALS when things are unfair (which is often). She's dramatic and bossy, but she's kind too. When the dormitory's Best and Brightest Witch cuts cake for everyone except shy Shalini, Daisy hands over her own birthday chocolate.

That mix is what makes her such good company. You laugh at her, and then you're very much on her side.

There's a proper mystery building underneath all the jokes, too. The ghostly headmistress seems to be stuck, a strange tree grows through the whole school, and its roots seem to like Daisy far more than they should. Who is she, really? Granny found her as a baby in a basket by a hedge, so that's a question hanging over the whole thing.

If you've got a reader who loves a narrator with LOTS of opinions and a school full of rules to argue with, this is perfect. The short chapters and jokes on every page keep it zipping along, and it's a good one for reading aloud, all the voices included.

What to read next

If your reader loves a witch school where everything goes wrong, The Worst Witch is lovely to try next. Mildred Hubble is in her first year at a gloomy academy on a mountain, crashing her broomstick and getting told off in every corridor.