By Jill Murphy
The clumsiest girl at a boarding school for witches keeps getting everything wrong, right up until the day she's the only one who can save the whole school.
Mildred Hubble is the worst witch at Miss Cackle's Academy, a gloomy castle where girls in black capes and pointed hats learn to fly broomsticks and mix potions. Mildred means well, but her spells go sideways, her broom won't behave, and her cat Tabby is scared of flying and rides clinging on upside down. Her best friend Maud sticks by her; the snooty Ethel does not, and after one nasty run-in Mildred accidentally turns Ethel into a pig. When a botched potion at the Hallowe'en display humiliates her in front of the whole school, Mildred decides to run away, and stumbles straight into a plot: a band of wicked witches, led by someone who looks exactly like kind Miss Cackle, is planning to take over the academy. Suddenly the worst witch is the only one who can stop them.
This is the gentlest, easiest landing on the shelf, and a lovely one for your child if they loved the idea of a magic school more than they'll admit they found the later Harry Potter books a bit long and dark. It's the book that basically invented the template, a witches' boarding school with strict teachers, a mean rival, and a warm best friend, decades before Hogwarts, and it does it all in a hundred short, funny pages your child can finish in an evening or two. Mildred is the friend you root for precisely because she's hopeless: she tries hard and gets it wrong and is brave anyway. For a reader who wants that boarding-school-of-magic feeling without a fat book or a scary one, this is the easy yes, and there's a whole series behind it.