The Ogre Downstairs

"I’d love to start with The Ogre Downstairs (1974) because that was, for me, at seven or eight a very important book. Not just because I loved it, but because it was a sort of turning point for me in realising how wonderful books could be. It mixes magic and reality in such a brilliant way that the magic feels very real. It is about two sets of children, each from divorced families. The father from one and the mother from another have got together and this new blended family is struggling to get along. The children are given these magic chemistry sets and each different chemical does a different thing. One of the chemicals makes you fly, another one brings all your toys to life and another can turn you into someone else. One of them brings things to life, so they put this chemical on the toffee bars and the toffee bars come to life. They cast their wrappers as they get bigger, so their wrappers fall off and they start having baby toffee bars. All of this lovely attention to detail made it feel incredibly real. I adored this book and read it to all my little siblings and cousins. So I not only enjoyed it myself but I passed it on to them. That power of reading aloud to younger children, making them laugh and seeing them as excited as I was, I think it’s possibly part of why I’m doing what I’m doing now. Yes, I write all of my books to be read aloud and that’s why they’re all a bit of a performance. I write my books specifically to be read aloud, to be enjoyed by the adults as well. But also as a performance, so in the Hiccup books, I give Gobber the Belch this big voice. Another character has a lisp. It’s all done to make it a performance, so that it is fun to read aloud. The Ogre Downstairs was marvellous to read aloud."