Description
Hectate Tenbury-Smith can turn people into animals, and create new animals out of thin air. She’s an animal witch, and a recent graduate of a school for good witches. Determined to make the world a better place, Heckie befriends a boy named Daniel, and informs him of her mission to do good by turning bad people into animals. Together, Heckie and Daniel perform many a good deed, such as turning the mean owner of a nursing home into a warthog. But then Heckie falls in love with the conniving Lionel Knacksap. Can Daniel foil Lionel’s evil plans and save Heckie from a broken heart?
About the Author
Eva Ibbotson (born Maria Charlotte Michelle Wiesner) was a British novelist specializing in romance and children's fantasy.She was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1925. When Hitler came into power, her family moved to England. She attended Bedford College, graduating in 1945; Cambridge University from 1946-47; and the University of Durham, from which she graduated with a diploma in education in 1965. Ibbotson had intended to be a physiologist, but was put off by the amount of animal testing that she would have to do. Instead, she married and raised a family, returning to school to become a teacher in the 1960s. Ibbotson was widowed with three sons and a daughter.Ibottson began writing with the television drama 'Linda Came Today', in 1965. Ten years later, she published her first novel,The Great Ghost Rescue.Ibbotson has written numerous books includingThe Secret of Platform 13, Journey to the River Sea, Which Witch?, Island of the Aunts,andDial-a-Ghost.She won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Journey to the River Sea, and has been a runner up for many of major awards for British children's literature.Her books are imaginative and humorous, and most of them feature magical creatures and places, despite the fact that she disliked thinking about the supernatural, and created the characters because she wanted to decrease her readers' fear of such things.Some of the books, particularlyJourney to the River Sea,also reflect Ibbotson's love of nature. Ibbotson wrote this book in honor of her husband (who had died just before she wrote it), a former naturalist. The book had been in her head for years before she actually wrote it.Ibbotson said she dislikes "financial greed and a lust for power" and often creates antagonists in her books who have these characteristics. Some have been struck by the similarity of "Platform 9 3/4" in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books to Ibbotson'sThe Secret of Platform 13,which came out three years before the first Harry Potter book.Her love of Austria is evident in works such asThe Star Of KazanandA Song For Summer.These books, set primarily in the Austrian countryside, display the author's love for nature and all things natural.
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