Conversational, warm and self-deprecating, Mangan argues fiercely for her favourites and is wise on the perils of rereading as an adult. Photograph: Jill Murphy, 1974īut many grown bookworms will identify with the nostalgic comforts of this love letter to reading. At secondary school, the tone shifts once more there’s a not entirely convincing flirtation with dystopia, the soapy appeal of Sweet Valley High and school stories, the high altar of Judy Blume.Īn image from Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch. The energy and anarchy of Dahl briefly distract, but it is the gentler dramas of Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Susan Coolidge, Noel Streatfeild and Louisa May Alcott that anchor her. Cosy fiction that recreates, with minor variations, “the predictable, familiar and safe world I knew” takes dominance – less a response to childhood anxieties, she writes, than a “shoring up” of her own lovely life.
With Plop, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark, she embarks on chapter books, the enchantment of The Worst Witch, the “miniature masterpiece” of Milly-Molly-Mandy, onwards to Enid Blyton and Narnia.Īs the child Lucy ages, so her reading tastes take shape. Introduced to books by her father, Mangan’s early childhood is a whirl of classics, from Eric Carle to Shirley Hughes and Judith Kerr, via Mr Men and Dr Seuss to a brief, alarming introduction to Der Struwwelpeter, culminating in the “author-illustrator nonpareil” Maurice Sendak.
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