Thursday 12 August 2010

Winnie's Midnight Dragon


Winnie's Midnight Dragon by Valerie Thomas.

Illustrated by Korky Paul

Amazon Link: £3.78



The Winnie Witch books have been a favourite at home for a while now, and with my daughter's seemingly unflagging mania for all things witchy, we've been steadily working through all of the Winnie Witch books we can grab from the local library.

In "Winnie's Midnight Dragon" the superb illustrations by Korky Paul actually lift a bit of a flat and featureless story quite a bit (I love how Paul's obviously a bit of an Apple / Mac fan as he always seems to be able to sneak a "Pumpkin" computer into various scenes in the books).

Poor Wilbur (Winnie's hapless cat) takes a bit of a back seat in this adventure but all the best moments in the book come at the end as the story draws to a satisfying conclusion.

Charlotte's best bit: Shouting "Abra-CADABRA" very loudly during the story text (by the way, only Winnie's allowed to say Abracadabra. When Meg (from Meg and Mog) does it, she's a pale imitation as far as Charlotte is concerned.

Daddy's favourite bit: Korky Paul's superbly scratchy ink illustrations. Any artist that in love with scratch pens definitely gets my vote.

Rating: 3 out of 5