It's spooky season and we're reading about witches with our special guest and Matt's sister, Ruby! Ruby chose both our books this month:

Winnie the Witch, by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul

The Doomspell, by Cliff McNish

Winnie and Ragwena represent opposite ends of the witch spectrum in terms of badness, but also in their attitude to colours. Nina, Matt and Ruby imagine a backstory for Winnie involving the Black Bull pub in Gateshead, discuss the differences (and similarities) between scifi and fantasy and have a pop at the cover art for The Doomspell.

We discussed a few books we've covered in other episodes, including:

Rumaysa, in episode 30

Coraline, in episode 32

And there's a lot of chat about JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis too. Here's an article about their weird, competitive friendship.

There's a 35 year anniversary celebration for Winnie the Witch happening at 7 Stories this coming November.

You can read about how The Doomspell came about and see lots of cool covers of the book in translation on the author's own website https://www.cliffmcnish.com/

What A Wonderful Day is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Shane Ivers of silvermansound.com