Authorgraph No 266: Jennifer Bell

Jennifer Bell interviewed by Joy Court

Having had a very enjoyable  Zoom conversation with best-selling author Jennifer Bell just before I attended the latest Insights briefing from Farshore about their Reading for Pleasure research, I was really struck by how much Jennifer  herself embodies the importance of developing reading for pleasure in schools. She confessed that as a young person, she ‘didn’t like reading at all’.  At school, teachers were continually presenting books to challenge her and there was no reading for entertainment. It was not until she was an adult of 23, when a friend passed her a copy of Eragon, that she had a ‘good reading experience’ and was swept up by the story. She had always loved stories but had accessed them through films, going on to study Film. After graduating and in her first job, she soon realised that she was years away from being able to create stories. She was now ‘reading everything’, working as a children’s bookseller at Foyles  and really loving it. She was writing in her lunch break, keen to discover if ‘writing the sort of stories I loved could be as much fun as reading them’

As a bookseller, Jennifer really related to the reluctant readers coming in, ‘because I was one’, and relished finding the hook to their interests and to get them the right book. She was obviously successful, winning Children’s Bookseller of the Year with the Foyles’ team and then again with Tales on Moon Lane bookshop. She  says she learnt so much about the market and what children really like to read at this time. The crucial 8-12 age group  is ‘The Recruitment Age’, she says, when children start to decide for themselves what they want to read, and this is who she is writing for.  ‘I write for the reader who needs to be engaged very quickly, like me as a child. I always knew I wanted to write something very obviously for entertainment, very obviously reading for pleasure’.  This was ‘instinctual’: ‘I don’t like things that are boring, so if I am bored writing it, I delete and go back and change it’.

One other advantage of working at Foyles was that lots of authors used the cafe there too, and she made some very helpful friends. They suggested a couple of kind agents who would perhaps let her down gently. Instead, they both offered representation and The Crooked Sixpence, the first book in The Uncommoners trilogy sold in 24 hours, with a contract for all three. She is fully aware of her ‘freak stroke of luck’, ‘I happened to have written the sort of book that editors were looking for at that time’ she modestly declares. Apparently, she got mugged the day after and was still so overjoyed that ‘it didn’t matter because I had sold my book!’

Incorporating all the lessons she had learned, The Uncommoners is definitely a fast-paced magical adventure with an intriguingly original concept at its heart: that everyday objects could have amazing powers in the decidedly uncommon world of Lundinor, which was inspired by the stories of her Cockney grandparents. The magical objects idea came from watching two children playing in the nursery section at Foyles, where they were driving small cars over a book transformed into a bridge. ‘Children can take any sort of object and can see something else in it’.

All her books share the common feature of a contemporary opening setting, where  readers can engage straight away with a  recognisable and convincing ‘child from their world’, who then goes to somewhere ‘extraordinary.’ She very specifically tries to ensure that every child would be able to find themselves in her books. As soon as she has the first plot draft completed, she goes back to check to ensure her characters are diverse enough. But in this she says she is only reflecting her own reality living in London, ‘the most diverse city in the world’.

Her career good fortune continued for, by the time she had completed the third Uncommoners book, she was bursting with ideas and keen tomove on. She had developed her Agents of the Wild series with Alice Lickens, an illustrator friend. These funny, fact packed, wildlife conservation themed adventures, aimed at the equally crucial younger, newly established, reader of around seven, went out for submission and were snapped up by Walker Books. Both in topic and delivery, they are pitch perfect for this incredibly curious age group. Walker then bought Wonderscape, the middle grade book she was also busily writing. I wondered which audience she preferred, but she loves both.  She found ‘writing the silliest things is so joyous’ and there is so much humour to be found in the grumpy animal sidekick (Attie the serious shrew in Agents of the Wild, most definitely honouring Lord David Attenborough).  We both agreed about the undervalued importance of humour in hooking readers, and it was certainly a ‘breath of fresh air’ from writing more complex worlds that would ‘really stretch a child’s imagination’.

Wonderscape and the sequel Legendarium are an imagination stretching collision of time travel and gaming, where Arthur, Ren and  Cecily get lost in an epic in-reality adventure game, and need the help of some extraordinary historical heroes  as they play their way home by solving puzzles. As I suspected, Jennifer does enjoy immersing herself in a  video game on her PlayStation 5 and with this series, she wanted to create a reading experience that showed gamers that they could enjoy all the excitement of a video game  in their own head. ‘You just have to be swept away once to know that it can happen with a book’ is the message she always gives at her school events. Herself a self-confessed ‘nerd’, she thought children would be excited to learn all about the amazing people from history that she had so enjoyed researching. ‘They will be trying to work out who will be in each room that they enter or wondering what legend they will encounter next.’

With her brand new Magicalia series launching with Race of Wonders, she again demonstrates her skill at making a series irresistible.  Her tips include ensuring that, while it is important to have an overarching villain in a series story arc, they must be ‘thwarted in a different way every time’; action sequences can ‘never be remotely the same’; and while it is lovely to have characters grow and develop from seeds planted in book one, every book must be a ‘good individual book on its own’. Because she ‘doesn’t want anything to put readers off’ with Magicalia she fought  really hard to get Walker to put numbers on the spine: ‘booksellers and librarians know this works.’  There will be a guide, at the beginning of each of the next three books planned, that explains the basics of this deftly crafted secret world, in which we meet strange creatures called Magicores. Bitsy and her best friend Kosh are there, following a trail of clues that will take them from London to India to Paris in hot pursuit of Bitsy’s father’s kidnappers.

There were two very different inspirations for the excitingly original Magicores. One is the hugely popular Pokémon game, showing again how well Jennifer can tap into external interests to hook readers. The other is Emily Dickinson’s line, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ prompting the thought, ‘what if it actually was a thing with feathers?’ and  ‘what if all our emotions were real creatures somehow, and like in Pokémon, had different powers and abilities?’ That sparked the idea and from there she started the ‘really fun’ process of designing Magicores, which meant ‘really interrogating what an emotion is and how it makes you physically feel, as well as what we associate with that emotion’. There is once again a real depth and richness to this magical world just as there is an emotional depth to all her characters.

It takes a quite extraordinary imaginative talent to be able to create such fresh, enthralling, thought provoking, empathetic and exciting stories, which uniformly fulfil her mission of writing books to be read with pleasure.  Jennifer Bell has established herself as an author who can be relied upon to provide exactly that and should be on the radar for all teachers and parents concerned about reluctant readers.  Fans, like me, will be looking forward to Magicalia 2: Thief of Shadows and will be delighted that we need only wait until February 2025. It is even more remarkable to be able,  at the same time, to craft warm, funny and informative stories for younger readers and I am delighted to have been let into the secret that there will be another delicious series for seven-year-olds coming in 2026. Watch out for the announcement!

Joy Court is a trustee of The United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA), co-founder of All Around Reading and Conference Manager for CILIP Youth Libraries Group. She is a Past Chair of the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals.

Books mentioned

All £7.99 pbk

The Uncommoners: The Crooked Sixpence, Puffin, 978-0552572507

Agents of the Wild: Operation Honey Hunt, Walker Books, 978-1406388459

Agents of the Wild: Operation Icebreak, Walker Books, 978-1406388466

Agents of the Wild: Operation Sandwhiskers, Walker Books, 978-1406388473

Wonderscape, Walker Books, 978-1406391725

Legendarium, Walker Books, 978-1406391732

Magicalia 1: Race Of Wonders, Walker Books, 978-1529506143

Magicalia 2: Thief of Shadows, Walker Books, 978-1529507454