Spellbound by children’s books, first as a reader, now as a writer

It’s been 25 years since the first Harry Potter book was published in June 1997. For my generation, who were the original group of children who grew up reading those books, the near-annual publication of a new instalment was a huge event, the highlight of many a summer, and kept us captivated by a magical world long after we’d have naturally put aside children’s stories.

I was 11 when I was given the first two Potter books back in the summer of 1998, shortly after the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets had come out. Living in Ireland, I got into the series ahead of most of my contemporaries, thanks to my English grandfather who had heard about the hype that was growing around the books in the UK and had obligingly brought them over on his annual visit. My sister and I devoured them; by the time the first film appeared, in 2001, most of our friends had too. Whenever a new book was published we’d draw up a rota to read it – two hours each – reading late into the night, unable to put it down.

When the last book was published in July 2007, a decade after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made its debut, I was 20 and studying English at Trinity. I still remember the sadness after finishing it – more than anything else, the conclusion of the series felt like the end of my childhood. However, years later, I’ve found myself back in a world of magic and adventure through writing books of my own, so it’s clear that the series instilled a long-lasting fascination with the art of storytelling.

Of course, it wasn’t just Harry Potter that encouraged my generation’s love of children’s literature. The 1990s was a particularly rich decade in terms of Irish children’s writers, who were being published by local presses such as Poolbeg, the O’Brien Press and Wolfhound. These formed the backbone of the little classroom libraries of my primary school, and were more accessible and prevalent than any of the overseas titles.

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Some of those books are still well-known today: Marita Conlon McKenna’s trilogy set during the Famine had just been published and I remember reading the first of them, Under the Hawthorn Tree, in class. It certainly didn’t gloss over the horror of that period – the intimate descriptions of starvation, disease and death evoke the reality of that time better than any history textbook. Conlon McKenna has a singular gift for evoking places and her descriptions of the Irish countryside, with its yellow gorse and lacy white hawthorn flowers, are particularly vivid, especially as a counterpoint to the unrelenting human suffering that makes up so much of the narrative. Although Under the Hawthorn Tree had only been published for a few years when we read it in class, there was already the sense that it was destined to become a classic.

Another writer who dominated Irish children’s literature when I was growing up was Siobhán Parkinson. I’d read Sisters… No Way! and the fantastically named Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe), but it was only when I started writing this piece that I realised that she’d also written Amelia, a historical novel set in 1914 Dublin and an old favourite of mine. I’d initially picked a plastic-wrapped copy up off my classroom’s bookshelves because I liked the cover – the original one showed a girl in a green dress with elbow-length gloves. The cover illustrates the starting point of the story perfectly: the world is about to go to war, there are stirrings of a rebellion against British rule, but Amelia’s main concern is what dress she’s going to wear to her 13th birthday party. To a 10-year-old who subsequently went on to work at a fashion magazine, this seemed like a fairly sensible set of priorities to me, although of course, Amelia soon finds herself in troubled circumstances with no use whatsoever for a shimmering gown the colour of emeralds. Revisiting it as an adult, it’s clear how Parkinson did a remarkably good job at evoking the atmosphere of such an uneasy, volatile time and making it come to life.

There were some lesser-known books to be found in the school library too. Badger, Beano and the Magic Mushroom was a prime example. The contents were as trippy as the title and for years afterwards, I wondered if I’d simply hallucinated it, given that I read it while stuck at home over a St Patrick’s Day weekend with the chickenpox and an unfeasibly high temperature. I was never subsequently able to find a copy, although I’d occasionally look out for it, but recently, thanks to the miracles of the internet, it’s resurfaced and I’ve since learned it was written by Jack Scoltock, and published by Wolfhound in 1990.

My own novel, Spellstoppers, has plenty of fantasy and magic in it, but it’s rooted firmly in the present day. Max, the 12-year-old protagonist, is unable to touch anything electrical – if he does, he destroys it. However, it turns out that he’s a spellstopper – a person with a gift for neutralising magical objects – and he goes off to be apprenticed to his grandfather, who lives in a secretive seaside village that’s dominated by a sinister castle and a rather terrifying Keeper. As you can imagine, adventure inevitably follows, as Max has to use his new-found power to try and save the village and his family. While I was certainly inspired by my childhood reading, I was keen to write something that would appeal to a new generation of youngsters, to carry on the tradition, while adding something different.

I suppose that everyone is affected to a certain degree by the stories they read when they were young. They have a way of sticking with you in a way that books you read as an adult never do. Perhaps that’s why there are so many grown-ups who still wish that they could find a way into Narnia, why Disney attracts as many adults as it does children, and why, 25 years later, there are millions of Harry Potter readers around the world who are still secretly hoping for a letter saying that there’s a place waiting for us at Hogwarts.

Spellstoppers’by Cat Gray was published by Usborne on July 7th. For more information, visit catrionagray.com