Anna Dale’s Magical Mischief is a very English magic story for 8 year olds, and it opens with a bookshop that has started to smell of manure.<\/p>\n
Mr Hardbattle cannot find the source of it. Odder still, nobody else smells manure. One customer gets hyacinths. Another gets vinegar. A well-spoken lady suggests, going pink, that he has someone look at his drains.<\/p>\n
It takes a Mrs Trinket, and a cup of tea with six sugars in it, to explain. Magic has moved in. It gives off whatever smell you personally hate most, so that people leave it be.<\/p>\n
Mr Hardbattle decides to let it stay. He rather likes the idea of being its protector, and it does mean he never has to dust again.<\/p>\n
Ten years on, the shop is full of it. The cat bookends yawn. The wastepaper basket goes for a slither round the floor. When the second to last stair turns to custard, he takes the dog and hides in his shed until it blows over.<\/p>\n
On his seventieth birthday the magic throws him a party. Paper chains everywhere. A crown lowered onto his head by a team of spiders. MANY HAPPY RETURNS cut out of the biggest atlas in the shop.<\/p>\n
Then the post arrives. His kind old landlord has died and the son is putting the rent up by five hundred pounds a month.<\/p>\n
So that’s the trouble. Mr Hardbattle loves his magic and his magic is quietly ruining him.<\/p>\n
Help arrives in the rain. Arthur collides with Miss Quint on the pavement outside and the pair of them come in to dry off. He does his homework at the library because home contains five brothers and sisters, two guinea pigs, an axolotl and a cockatiel. She makes prize-winning marmalade and lost her flat to a gas explosion.<\/p>\n
The jokes are small and constant. Drawing pins fire themselves into a letter to spell MYOB, and poor Miss Quint has to have it explained to her that she is being told to mind her own business.<\/p>\n
Underneath all that there is real feeling, and it is never laboured. Arthur’s form teacher calls him Not Goodenough and thinks it’s funny. Miss Quint says she has had her roots pulled up and cannot work out which way to turn.<\/p>\n
One small thing to flag. A character dies before the story properly gets going. It happens off the page, in a letter, and nobody your reader has met is in danger.<\/p>\n
If you’ve got a child who likes their magic domestic rather than epic, this is a lovely one. No chosen one. No dark lord. Just a smelly bookshop, a dog called Scallywag and six weeks to find somewhere else for the magic to live.<\/p>\n
The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams has a shop with opinions of its own. Rhyme and Reason sulks when a customer criticises the wallpaper, and then the wallpaper changes colour so everybody knows about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anna Dale’s Magical Mischief is a very English magic story for 8 year olds, and it opens with a bookshop that has started to smell of manure. Mr Hardbattle cannot find the source of it. Odder still, nobody else smells manure. One customer gets hyacinths. Another gets vinegar. A well-spoken lady suggests, going pink, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10949,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8868,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams","lr_seo_hook":"Magic has moved into a bookshop and it smells of whatever you hate most."},"book_tag":[1047],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[107],"class_list":["post-8015","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-magic-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-anna-dale"],"yoast_title":"Magical Mischief by Anna Dale | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Magic has moved into a bookshop and it smells of whatever you hate most. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n