Yet more ponies for Jean

After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s superb The Child that Books Built exists, we need this new memoir by Lucy Mangan, about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting.

Where Spufford mined the depths of his childhood anguish in his urge to get to the bottom of his pre-adolescent craving for escape into ‘the Forest’, ‘the Island’, ‘the Town’ and ‘the Hole’ (as he named the four varieties of childhood fantasy), Mangan just grabs us by both hands and takes us for a whirlwind romp through her antisocial childhood in a happy family home in Catford — where, if anyone was looking for her, she was probably to be found exactly where she had been eight hours before. ‘I didn’t need parenting,’ she writes, ‘just feeding and rotating every few hours on the sofa to avoid pressure sores.’