New children’s books: Scoffers, squiddlers and how to find magic in your garden

“In the beginning the world was wild, and magic called to every child.” So begins Believe by Catherine Doyle and Freya Hartas (Magic Cat, £16.99, 5+), a compelling compendium of magical creatures, perfect for poring over as the seasons change. Sage Brightling is cast as our fairy escort, guide to the “wonders that can only be spied, if you truly believe with your heart open wide”.

Doyle’s engaging rhythmic verse provides a general introduction to the various typologies of magical beings, who are captured in Hartas’s hand-drawn double-page spreads, before the individual traits are identified in close-ups.

From selkies to kelpies, hippogriffs to hippocampi, scoffers to squiddlers, and muki to puca, Believe draws inspiration from a wide range of international fairy tales and myths. Irish beasts and Scottish monsters feature, as do a variety of Australasian magical creatures. Japanese spirits even get their own section: keep an eye out for the Kasa-obake, a one-legged, one-eyed umbrella ghost.

In the green, green kingdom in Who Said Boo? by Jeanne Willis, illustrated by Brian Fitzgerald (Scallywag Press, £12.99, 3+), the Green King and Green Queen are trying desperately to spot the green, green ghost, who has been terrifying the castle day and night. When the jester is falsely accused of frightening everyone, he has a bright idea. Why not paint the rooms red and blue? Then the green, green ghost will have nowhere to hide.

Who Said Boo? is a silly story of haunting rather than a scary one, and a great pleasure to read aloud. The repetition and rhythm of the rhyming provides a tongue-twister energy, while Fitzgerald has fun finding dozens of contrasting greens to ensure the colour palette of the verdant pages never feels limiting.

Is it a ghost in Willow’s bedroom? That’s the question the baby’s family, and the reader, have to ask in Boo, one of the delightful uncanny super-short stories collected in The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen by Guy Bass and David Roberts (Little Tiger, £16.99, 8+), which uses the 3D potential of the young reader’s own imagination to spook and unsettle, just a little bit. The inspired book design presents the stories in a variety of engaging styles, including classic comic-book spreads mocked up on vintage paper, but it is the creepy creatures that leap from the original legends that are the real draw. Pay particular attention to the cute ones. A medium-sized rabbit, a gigglytib, even Gran should be treated with suspicion.

The creature living in Alice Fairchild’s postbox, with its “green face ... framed by tufts of electric-blue hair”, might be a gigglytib. Alice isn’t sure what he is when she finds herself shrunk and transported from her new home in Little Wobbleton, where everything is off-kilter, into the miniature world of the post collectors. In fact, the creature is a gremlin called Mr Grebson, and although another child might be terrified of him, Alice thinks he might just be able to help her reconnect with her mum, but Mr Grebson and his fellow gremlins have something they need from her too. DT Moorhouse’s Grebs and Co. (Everything with Words, £8.99, 8+) distinguishes itself with the equal oddity of its dual settings, evoked in some lubbly jubbly language that trips off the tongue, making this a confident debut from an Irish author.

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If gremlins nibbled humans instead of biscuits, you just might find the right antidote in A Guide to Plants for Little Witchlings (post wave,£12.99, 5+), written by Jennifer Lane, with whimsical illustrations by Adelina Lirius. A witchling is someone “who believe(s) magic is around us everywhere in nature ... someone who knows that everything in nature is special and needs to be taken care of”.

Lane offers a wealth of nature’s secrets to young readers (witches-in-training), introducing just some of the magical healing properties you might find in the flower beds of your own back garden. There are recipes for a “good vibes” wild garlic pesto to pep you up, a Basil Protection Pizza full of vitamin C, and how-to guides for a variety of charms to inspire friendship (daisies), luck (honeysuckle), sweet dreams (violet). There are spells too: a confidence spell foraged from the dandelion patch and a “sleep well” spell conjured from lavender, to ensure a good night’s rest before nature calls again.

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For a more scientific approach both to witching and to healing, two new non-fiction titles from the reliable DK take a deep dive into the history of these Halloweeny themes. In The Extraordinary History of Witches (DK, £16.99, 8+) Hazel Atkinson investigates the ancient origins of our ideas about magic and witchcraft, providing a social context for stereotypes, and up-to-date engagement with the relationship between witches and political resistance.

Despite the international thrust of the research, Kilkenny witch Alice Kyteler is deemed important enough in the broader context to have her own two-page entry. There is a small overlap with Blood, Guts and Nasty Cuts (DK, £14.99, 8+), a history of medicine by Dr Alanna Skuse, with illustrations by Oyemathias: food and herbs are cited for their potential healing properties, but so too are vaccinations and antibiotics, and the book draws out the connection between both with fascinating facts: poop-soup will have the budding young doctor giggling with both glee and disgust.