There’s no shortage of magical rings in the children’s canon, the sort of things that usefully make you invisible or beautiful. But rings that can turn objects into a pile of excrement are something else. So one warms to Bianca Pitzorno’s Lavinia and the Magic Ring, translated from the Italian by Laura Watkinson (Catnip, £5.99) whose heroine, an orphaned match girl, is given one. Her subsequent adventures have more than a touch of Roald Dahl, being illustrated by Dahl’s co-creator, the ever fabulous Quentin Blake.
The sublime Judith Kerr is 95 and razor-sharp with it. Her latest, Mummy Time (HarperCollins, £12.99), is about the wonderful adventures, real and imagined, of a little boy in a park while his mother is on her mobile phone to a friend. Spot on.
The 30th anniversary of Dahl’s Matilda (Puffin, £12.99) means an anniversary edition, with new covers by Quentin Blake showing our heroine as astrophysicist and world explorer. Except the book, for all its anarchic brilliance, feels somewhat dated now, with the horrible people glued to a telly. These days, they’d be on separate screens. And personally I rather yearn for a Miss Trunchbull.
Another genius is Shirley Hughes, a mere 91. She is incapable of drawing a child or anyone else who isn’t lovable, and by some magic she sees the world as a child does. Her Snow in the Garden: A First Book of Christmas (Walker, £12.99), with Christmassy stories and things to do, would be a good present for the little ’uns. For slightly older children, Ruby in the Ruins (Walker, £12.99), is a sympathetic account of a young girl’s reaction to her father’s return from the war.
One illustrator I can never get enough of is David Lucas (check out his Christmas at the Toy Museum).
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