Bella Broomstick: Magic Mistakes by Lou Kuenzler

I can't really explain what unmistakably marks some books as of British origin - there's a certain whacky, Dahlesque flavor of fantasy that just is British and this definitely falls into that category.

Bella Broomstick lives with her nasty Aunt Hemlock and is the worst witch ever, not even counting her own parents (a spell to turn themselves into mice to make baby Bella laugh went sadly awry). She's failed the witch's exam two times and her third, dramatic failure, condemns her to a horrible fate - being sent to the human world! Except Bella is actually not so sure this is a horrible fate after all. She's sneaked a lot of peeks at a department store catalog and the thought of hot baths instead of a dip in the sludgy pond, a bathroom instead of an outhouse, and no more eating spiders and toads sounds good to her! Her new foster parents are lovely and she's fitting right in, mostly, until she loses the magical moth Aunt Hemlock enchanted to make the Ables want her. They couldn't possibly want to keep her without magic, could they?

Bella and her aunt are shown with the same dark skin and curly hair and Mr. Able is lightly tanned (although with black and white illustrations it's hard to tell if he's white or not). The rest of the human and witch world is shown as white (or, occasionally, green). There are lots of cute pictures of cats, sparkling potions, and Bella's new life as well as little decorations of her mean aunt turning her into things and her gruesome life before the Ables.

This is a very typical "rags to riches" story with a Dahlesque flavor of wicked villains and Bella's dark skin adding just a little diversity (one review says that all the "bad" people are dark-skinned but that's... not true? The nasty Seymour family is white and the pictures of the girls who bullied Bella in the witch world show them as white also while Mr. Able is possibly a little darker in skin tone.) The over-the-top abuse of Bella was just icky to me - her aunt threatens, beats, and uses magic on her, eats spiders and other nasty tidbits, and is just generally nasty. But for kids who like this dramatic genre, it's sure to be a hit.

Verdict: If you have a lot of fans of Dahl and this particular brand of British humor this could be popular; it isn't one that's gotten a lot of interest in my library though, so I'll pass.

ISBN: 9781524767815; This edition published August 2018 by Random House; Borrowed from another library in my consortium