Wanda Coven’s Heidi Heckelbeck Makes a Wish is a magical school story for 6 year olds about a young witch who says something she doesn’t mean at exactly the wrong moment.<\/p>\n
Heidi’s class is off to the botanical gardens. There’s a hedge maze, trees trimmed into animal shapes, rides shaped like fruit and vegetables and ice-cream bars at the end. Then Bruce (who always knows the weather) says it’s going to rain.<\/p>\n
Heidi isn’t having that. She gets out her Book of Spells and finds one called Everyday Wishes. It needs a straw hat, powdered sugar, three lemon gumdrops pinched off an old gingerbread house and a drop of flower dew.<\/p>\n
There’s no dew on Mum’s daisy in the afternoon. So Heidi makes her own with tap water. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n
Quite a lot! The storm arrives right in the middle of the maze. Lucy slips in the mud, Bruce’s glasses get trodden on and nobody gets their picnic or a single ride.<\/p>\n
Back home, soaked and cross with everyone, Heidi grumbles that sometimes she’d rather not be a witch at all. Her spell hat is sitting right in front of her at the time. Soon the words in her Book of Spells are vanishing off the page.<\/p>\n
Aunt Trudy is a witch too, so she’s the one Heidi runs to. There’s only one way to undo it. Heidi has to find three people who make a wish and then grant each one WITHOUT magic.<\/p>\n
That’s the bit young readers will love. Heidi goes round the playground asking everyone what they’d wish for. She gets a pet panda, a supercomputer and a slide from a bedroom straight into a swimming pool (not much use!). So she starts listening out for the small wishes instead, like a ball stuck on the basketball hoop or a classmate who’s muddled by his maths homework.<\/p>\n
Heidi is very easy to like. She gets things wrong, she snaps at her little brother Henry and then she feels awful about it. There’s a lovely idea underneath all the fun about how much you can do for people just by helping, and it never gets preachy.<\/p>\n
This is the seventeenth Heidi book, but the story explains everything a new reader needs to know about her witchy family. It’s short and the sentences are simple, so it’s a good one for a child reading on their own.<\/p>\n
If they’d like more of Heidi, Lucy and Bruce, Heidi Heckelbeck and the Big Mix-Up is the next one along, and it starts with Heidi’s new jumper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wanda Coven’s Heidi Heckelbeck Makes a Wish is a magical school story for 6 year olds about a young witch who says something she doesn’t mean at exactly the wrong moment. Heidi’s class is off to the botanical gardens. There’s a hedge maze, trees trimmed into animal shapes, rides shaped like fruit and vegetables and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11780,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7627,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Heidi Heckelbeck and the Big Mix-Up","lr_seo_hook":"A little witch loses her magic and must grant three wishes without it."},"book_tag":[1047],"age_group":[31],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[1023],"class_list":["post-7626","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-magic-books","age_group-books-for-6-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-wanda-coven"],"yoast_title":"Heidi Heckelbeck 17 – Heidi Heckelbeck Makes a Wish by Wanda Coven | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A little witch loses her magic and must grant three wishes without it. For ages 6+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n