CRACKING KIDS READS
Our top tips to satisfy those little bookworms.
CRESSIDA COWELL is tucked away in the shed at the bottom of her garden. She is lost in a world of her own, buried under a tangle of green creepers.
But she’s not potting. This little haven – walls festooned with photos and sketches of a secret island – is where the author and illustrator weaves her magic.
Her multi-million selling book series, How to Train Your Dragon, set in a fictional Viking world where putupon Hiccup learns how to become a hero the hard way, has been translated into 38 languages. And it inspired a DreamWorks’ movie and a TV franchise of the same name.
Now her latest fantasy creation, The Wizards Of Once, out on September 19, looks set for similar success. The DreamWorks studio has already acquired the adaption rights.
I’m keen to know how she comes up with material so fantastically magical that it has gripped a generation of young readers and fired the imagination of movie makers behind other great kids’ films like Boss Baby, Kung Fu Panda and Trolls. The answer is on the wall. “The How To Train Your Dragon books were inspired by the summers I spent as a child on a tiny, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland,” Cressida reveals.
The writer is the daughter of environmentalist Michael Blakenham,79, a former chairman of London’s Kew Gardens and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and his artist wife Marcia,70, a director of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.
Mum-of-three Cressida explains: “We lived in London, where my father worked, but being an environmentalist, his heart was in the wilderness.
“So every year from when I was four my family would be dropped off like castaways on this uninhabited island off the west coast, an island so small that when you stood on the top of it you could see sea all around you.
“There was no phone or electricity and no shops, roads or any other houses.
“If something went wrong we just had to sit tight and hope the boat really did come to pick us up in two weeks’ time.
“I was a bit more of a worrier than my parents. I thought they were completely crazy and were even crazier when they got a boat, because my father was a very confident sailor but he didn’t really know what he was doing. There was something glorious about the dignified way he barked out orders while heading us straight into a force eight gale, or hitting a rock.
“I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories to entertain myself and my younger brother and sister, and little cousins.
“In the evening, my father told us tales of the Vikings who invaded the island archipelago 1200 years before, of the quarrelsome tribes who fought and tricked each other, and of the legends of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs.”
The island, and its stories, fuelled her creative mind. The rest is history.
Cressida smiles: “We still go there. I went there with my children this Easter. My dad is nearly 80 and he still likes to go and stay there on his own, it’s his ‘heart’ place so he won’t let me name it.”
In the same way as How To Train Your Dragon is suffused with the spirit of the Hebrides, The Wizzards Of Once has the magic of the chalk and woods of England’s South Downs coursing through it.
“The hill we used to play on in Sussex, where my grandmother lived, was called Fairy Hill because of the unexplained mounds on it,” the writer explains.
“As a child I wondered what lay sleeping below these marks and stones and burial mounds? What if the legends of fairies and giants and other magical creatures were not legends, but true stories? That is the premise of The Wizards of Once.”
Loosely based on Britain at the dawn of the Iron Age, the book pulsates with magic and adventure in a world of dark forests where there are wizards and warriors.
Cressida says of her young readers: “I try to make them laugh, I make them cry, I scare the beejeezus out of them, I make them think. I move them emotionally. This is often their first experience of books, so I want to give them a sense of the gobsmacking potential of what a book can do.
“I have to outwit the reader, outbox them, dazzle them with the magic of language, and convey an almost spiritual awe at the wonder of the world that we live in,” she adds.
But the book is not just for the children. Cressida says : “I write these books to be read aloud, by adults to kids. Parents are so busy nowadays, that it can feel hard to fit in that reading time.
“But 10 minutes a day, although it may not sound like much, makes a real difference to a child’s reading ability.”