Nicky at the Magic House

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Nicky is a young witch. While still just learning to fly her broom,
Nicky crash-lands in the attic of a peculiar-looking old house. Her
broomstick is broken, but at first Nicky is too enchanted by beautiful
music coming from the floor below to care. She descends floor after
floor, drawn by a series of sounds, smells, and accidents. On each floor
of the magic house, she meets a different witch. In this book, there are
nice witches and not-so-nice witches, but no evil witches in the Hansel
and Gretel mode. Nicky eventually finds a Fixing Witch, who repairs her
broomstick and sends her on her way.

This volume, originally published in Belgium, is striking in both its
artwork and story line. Through Clavis’s translation, language leaps
out with lines like “the land lay quietly in darkness like a large
sleeping animal” and “Nicky swerved in and out of the crackling
stars.”

The rich artwork is spiked with a page design that allows the reader to
alter the picture by turning a half page inserted between each full
page. This would merely be a gimmick in a lesser book. Here the
half-page flip works beautifully. Highly recommended.