Featuring delightfully odd characters and eccentric magic, this all too brief tale is a fine introduction to the late author’s more complex YA novels. The witch and the Mandrake, however, have never before dealt with a determined girl who claims alpha status Zelinsky’s spot art, not all seen by PW, makes it clear that the squinty, pigtailed heroine is not someone to be trifled with. I would like to declare Diana Wynne Jones an international treasure, proclaimed Neil. Powerful and evil, Bella Yaga uses Earwig as a second pair of hands for grinding up disgusting things in bowls (“The only thing wrong with magic is that it smells so awful,” Earwig quips). Buy a cheap copy of Earwig and the Witch book by Diana Wynne Jones.

Growing up in an orphanage in the British countryside, Earwig has no idea that her mother had magical. Morwald’s Home for Children until she is adopted by a witchy woman named Bella Yaga with “one brown eye and one blue one, and a raggety, ribby look to her face.” Earwig hopes to learn magic from Bella Yaga, but is trapped in the woman’s decrepit house, sharing it with the Mandrake, an impossibly tall and grouchy being. Earwig and the Witch (2020) Blu-ray / Steel Book. Then one day Earwig is chosen to live with a very strange couple: Bella Yaga, her new mother, is actually a horrible witch. Unlike the other children, she loves it there, mostly because she has the run of the place and seems to be able to persuade people to do as she wants.

This funny story updates fairy tale conventions while highlighting Jones’s subversive wit and her firm belief that children can control their own lives. Earwig was left at St Morwalds as a baby.

Earwig and the witch novel