What To Read After... Meg and Mog

Published on: 21 October 2021

It's impossible not to love Helen Nicoll and Jan Pieńkowski's accident-prone witch Meg and her best friends, Mog and Owl. Here's our top selection of the stories to read after.

Illustration: Jan Pieńkowski

For wonderful witches...

Helen Nicoll and BookTrust Lifetime Achievement winner Jan Pieńkowski created an iconic series of picture books in the 1970s and 80s about a witch whose spells always seem to go wrong, her stripy cat Mog and their friend Owl.

If your kids loved Meg the witch with her wonky spells and her long black cloak, they might enjoy the long-running Winnie the Witch series by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul which features a zany witch protagonist getting up to all sorts of adventures. Alternatively, shy children might love Wanda, the studious but shy witch in Wanda’s Words Got Stuck or in Bethan Woollvin’s Hansel & Gretel it’s Willow the witch who is the “goodie” and the naughty Hansel and Gretel that destroy everything.

For slightly older children, Perdita and Honor Cargill’s Diary of an Accidental Witch is written in a diary style and has plenty of humour alongside a plot that deals with bullying and starting a new school. Or, mid-primary aged children might love Pénélope Bagieu’s reimagining of Roald Dahl’s classic The Witches as a graphic novel for younger readers.

Illustration: Jan Pieńkowski

For beautiful illustrations and Halloween hijinks...

Jan Pienkowski was also famous for his pop-up books such as Haunted House, Dinner Time, Little Monsters and many more, but he also loved fairy tales and illustrated a fabulous collection of Polish folk tales, The Glass Mountain written by his lifetime partner David Walser, as was their edition of The Thousand and One Nights.

If you’re after Halloween-themed picture books, Patricia Toft and Jarvis’ Pick a Pumpkin is wonderfully festive, and Oliver Jeffers’ There’s a Ghost in This House features some adorable ghosts in a haunted house, complete with transparent pages so you can make the ghosts appear and disappear. John Kane’s brilliant I Say Boo, You Say Hoo features a lot of hilarious Halloween-themed opportunities for calling each other a stinky poo, or, for something quieter, Giles Andreae and Emma Dodd’s I Love Halloween is the perfect read to settle down little ones after the excitement of trick-or-treating.

Illustration: Paula Bowles