News

The Vanishing Trick is the Watersones’ Children’s book of the month!

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Congratulations Jenni on your mystifying middle-grade debut, The Vanishing Trick, being announced as May’s Waterstones Children’s Book of the Month!

This comes off the back of the brilliant news of the book being also picked as The Sunday Times‘Children’s Book of the Week’, editor Nicolette Jones stated:

This debut novel, which reads like a fairy tale with a Victorian setting, features a fascinating villain, Madame Pinchbeck, who has supernatural powers to imprison stolen children and is a charlatan who holds seances to trick people about their departed loved ones. Sustaining these two traits in one character – spell casting and fake spirituality – requires skill. It should not work that the baddie is both a fraud and an actual magician, yet Spangler makes us believe. She conjures up an eventful gothic adventure full of secrets and surprises, based on the relationship between three lost children whom pinchbeck has captured and their perilous struggle to escape. Despite the chilling central character, this is a touching story about love and loyalty.

About the book:

Step into a world of secrets, folklore and illusions, where nothing is as it seems and magic is at play…

Madame Augustina Pinchbeck, travels the country conjuring the spirits of dearly departed loved ones… for a price. Whilst her ability to contact ghosts is a game of smoke and mirrors, there is real magic behind her tricks too - if you know where to look.

Through a magical trade, she persuades children to part with precious objects, promising to use her powers to help them. But Pinchbeck is a deceiver, instead turning their items into enchanted Cabinets that bind the children to her and into which she can vanish and summon them at will.

When Pinchbeck captures orphan Leander, events are set into motion that see him and his new friends Charlotte and Felix, in a race against time to break Pinchbeck’s spell, before one of them vanishes forever…

Congratulations Jenni, we are so proud of you!