Lauren Crozier, The Best Witch in Paris, Text Publishing, September 2024, 256 pp., RRP $17.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781922790880
The Best Witch in Paris is going to delight fans of Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch series, or anyone who enjoyed the charm of Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Luna gets on the wrong side of a very powerful witch when Madame Valadon’s familiar goes missing and she becomes convinced that Luna knows something about it. The tiny boobook owl that Luna bought from a mysterious bird-seller certainly fits the description of Madam Valadon’s familiar, but the more ruthless Madame Valadon becomes in her determination to reclaim her missing owl, the more sure Luna is that it would be a bad idea to hand Silver over to her. After all, a familiar can only belong to one witch and Silver seems to have decided to belong to Luna.
Luna is surrounded by love and found family, and I adored the delightful, jumbly mess of her three aunts and Luna’s life in the old broom shop with them. Lauren Crozier has also filled the book with witch communities living in Paris and Melbourne, and readers are going to be enchanted by hints of a whole world of dragons and magic in the corners of our familiar cities.
There are themes of friendship and family running throughout The Best Witch in Paris as Luna navigates old and new friendships to help her through the problems she faces when Madame Valadon escalates her threats. Luna was also found and taken in as a baby by the three witches she calls her aunts, but she is left questioning her sense of who she is, and her certainty that she is a witch too, after another ploy by Madame Valadon nearly gets Luna kicked out of her witchcraft school because she doesn’t know who her parents are.
This is a great book for young readers whose reading level goes beyond their emotional maturity. The story is age-appropriate for a reader aged 7 or 8, but the writing will stretch them a little further, and older primary readers are going to get caught up in Luna and her friends working to foil Madame Valadon’s devious plots.
Reviewed by Emily Clarke