captaind's Full Review: Keith McGowan - The Witch's Guide to Cooking with ...
The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children starts with a forward by the witch Fay Holaderry relates her love for eating children, how she traps them, how some parents actually ask her to get rid of their children this way and, at the end, cautions that some children are a bit too clever for their own good and actually manage not to be eaten. The rest of the book is, not surprisingly, the story of two children who were just a bit too clever for the witch...
Author Keith McGowan's first book for children, The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children is an updated version of the Hansel and Gretel fable. It's illustrated by Yoko Tanaka who has a unique, quirky style - though since my review copy wasn't a final print, the illustrations I saw were lower quality than the finished version will be. Still they were fun and pretty strange, which was a good fit to the book and added a little to it.
The overall storyline is a bit predictable, but all the same it's a nice, modern reworking of a familiar children's tale. The main characters are Sol and Connie - Sol is a very intelligent young lad who's very interested in science and also experimenting or inventing; Connie is his younger sister, less intelligent but perhaps more shrewd (definitely more crafty). They have recently moved into a new area and are not greatly enjoying the change. Their parents are an odd couple too - in fact their father is not who he appears to be at all, and their step-mother is a nasty piece of work trying to pretend to be lovely (and failing completely). Holaderry and her dog are in the local area, as well as another witch - but is she friend or foe?
The book is full of secrets, and at pains to tell you that there are secrets to be unravelled. Connie has a secret that she's keeping from her brother (this one is pretty obvious), their father has a dark secret (that's not so obvious). There's a lot of humour in the book, most of it on a level for the book's target audience - 10-12 year olds (perhaps 8-14 depending on the child) in mind, but some that adults will enjoy on a different level. For instance Sol and Connie's real mother died while conducting experiments on an iceberg - she was proved right because the iceberg melted while she was standing on it, and she thus became one of the first victims of global warning. Sol and Connie go to see a movie, which wasn't very good but, because it was PG-13, Connie enthuses that it was the best film ever, and wants to see as many more PG-13 rated films as she can, as soon as possible.
It's nicely written, and the story's great for its target audience - at the same time being a fun, very quick read for older ones. The slightly ambiguous ending may not be to everyone's liking; since the theme of forgiveness is explored in the book and the ending is largely based on this, I would have liked to see something a little more definite, and I think some parents would too. However one of the beauties of this book is that it doesn't quite approach things in the way you'd expect, so it's not a major criticism. Perhaps more could have been done with the basic idea but it's still a very good read for younger children. There is a fair bit of repetition and some bits that seemed to me to be pointing out the obvious, but those parts will probably help children to keep on track with what's happening in the story.
I've given it a rating of 4 stars based on its suitability for the target audience; from an adults point of view, I'd give it 3 stars.
My copy (an uncorrected proof) weighed in at 180 pages, and had quite large, very easy to read text. It's not going to take even a younger child very long to read but they'll certainly enjoy it.
(Thanks Andy for arranging a review copy of this book.)
Incidentally, can I just point out that reviewing children's books when you're an adult is actually exceptionally difficult?!?
Here are a few others I've attempted (with my guess - probably completely wrong! - at the age group it's intended for)...
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