The Museum of Lost Umbrellas (Cloud Witch Chronicles)

This hugely enjoyable story starts with 10-year-old Dilly being brought by her social worker to the Celtic island of Ollipest to stay with a grand-aunt, (Irish for great-aunt), whom she has never met before. Dilly comments that the house, Tail End Cottage, looks like an owl, and we soon learn that her perception is significant – there is magic in the house and on the island. Its use is forbidden, but when the Museum of Lost Umbrellas opens after being closed for some time, magic becomes difficult to deny: the umbrellas, which, of course, are not lost at all, can take their owners flying! When a nasty anti-magic outsider arrives, he behaves like a Witchfinder, trying to whip up the local people against the Museum and magic in general, but Dilly and her new friends, including a talking parrot which was once a boy and needs to be turned back, are keen to restore the island to the happy, magical place that it had been before the island voted to ban magic. Dilly learns that she has her own magical powers, learns how to harness them and use them well, and her supposedly cantankerous grand-aunt turns out to be a real ally. Orphan Dilly has evidently found a new home, and this is only the first of her adventures, which are to be known as the Cloud Witch Chronicles.

Marie Louise Fitpatrick is an award-winning illustrator of many picture books, as well as an author, and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Award for Writing for On Midnight Beach, based on the Irish legend The Táin. She says, ‘My novels are rooted in myth and legend but ultimately they are concerned with how we each twist and turn and struggle (and laugh and dance) towards adulthood’. This is an exciting, imaginative and absorbing book-definitely recommended, and your reviewer is looking forward to the next one!