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.
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