Book Title: The Adventures
of Caitlin Haq
ISBN 9781780690643
Part of Series: No
Author: Stuart
Williams
Available at: Smashwords
Price: $4.99
Number of words (approximately): 33 340
Star Rating (of five): 4
Summary: Caitlin is not
an ordinary girl. Her mum is not an
ordinary mum. Cailtin and her back cat
go on exciting adventures, frightening robbers and punishing bullies, helping
her friends and having great fun.
Extract:
- It was the kind of night that wasn’t really black.
It was the kind of night when the sky was very blue and all of the stars had
come out and the moon was a sort of bright white. The kind of night when you could
see all of the shapes of all of the houses and the big hill on the edge of the
town looked like a big dark lump when you looked out of Caiti Haq’s sitting
room window. There were so many stars in the sky, Caiti wondered how they could
all fit and thought that, if she had a pen that could write in the sky, it
would take forever to join them up.
You see, standing in her sitting room window to look
at the stars was easy because mummy still hadn’t put any curtains up. Mummy had
said that she couldn’t put any curtains up because they would fall down as there
was no pole to hang them on, and that wasn’t mummy’s fault because her friend,
who had said he would put it up, kept forgetting to whenever he came round to
do it. But looking at the stars was better now than before because mummy had
had the new carpet put down so her feet didn’t get cold, like they did when it was
only the old brown tiles on the floor. Caiti loved looking at the stars and the
moon because she really wanted to fly there one day, and she knew that, if she
worked very, very hard, she might when she was older. A lot older, that is,
because children didn’t go into space, you had to be very old, perhaps twenty
or even twenty-five to do that.
“Come on you, up those stairs, young lady, school in
the morning, and clean your teeth tonight!” Mummy shouted from the kitchen.
Caiti gave the moon a little wave and skipped into the hall. This was easy
because, when mummy had the new carpet put down, the door had gone from the
sitting room and was now up the garden, leaning against the garage. Caiti had
wondered why, because, when her friends had new carpets fitted, none of their doors
had gone missing. But then, even though she was only ten years old, Caiti knew
that her mummy was a bit stranger than other mummies and was always doing funny
things. Most of the time this was alright because it made her laugh but there
were times when she was really embarrassing.
Caiti thought, “You see what I mean,” as, when she was
half way up the stairs going to the bathroom, mummy ran up behind her, grabbed
her round the middle and shouted, “I’m gonna-eat-ya, I’m gonna-eat-ya,” and carried
her into her bedroom, even though she’d just told her to clean her teeth and
she needed to be in the bathroom for that.
Caiti was lying on her high-up bed, with Slim asleep
across her feet, snoring peacefully, his tail shooting up in the air to point
at the ceiling every time he breathed out, when, suddenly, in the way that
animals do, he suddenly woke, his senses aware of something, he didn’t know what
but there was something there. Turning slowly, he arched his back and pointed
his body at the window, his nose wrinkling and his green eyes narrowing to
little slits. Caiti sat upright, her heart pounding. Hardly daring to breath,
she gulped with fright as a shape appeared outside her window, hovering. The
silhouette wobbled as a thin, spooky arm reached out and tapped gently on the glass.
Slim hissed and his claws flicked from his tiny paws.
Caiti dived for the cover of the sheets as the thing spoke in a squeaky little
voice. “Slim, you stupid feline, let me in before I turn you into a toad. It’s Witch
Wobblytum. I need your help.” Slim jumped from the bed and excitedly opened the
window. Wobblytum sat astride the shaft of her broomstick, bobbing in the night
air. “Oh curse the broomstick,” she spat as she wobbled nervously, “it keeps
going down instead of up.” As the stick flicked backwards and forwards, her
crash helmet bounced on her head and her oversized football shirt flapped like
a bird with one wing.
Caiti climbed down the ladder from her bed, held her
hand out to Wobblytum, and spoke in a way so calm you would think that she
often met witches on wobbly broomsticks outside her bedroom window, “Good evening.”
Wobblytum spoke first to Caiti and then at the
unstable stick. “Good evening. Oooh, arrrr, stand still you stupid thing.”
“This is my old witch,” said Slim, introducing Caiti,
“that’s why I’m blacker than any cat you’ve ever seen, because I was a witch’s
cat once.”
“Yes he was and a very good one too. Ooooh,” added
Wobblytum, finishing with a scream as the stick made a dive for the lawn, her white
Nike trainers kicking on the end of her thin, multi-coloured legs. -
Reviewer’s Comments:
Structure: The book is
well structured. It is written in
children’s English, with use of words appropriate to the context.
Content: The book is
written for fun-loving young readers, in a series of short stories, with a
flow-through of one adventure to another.
Reviewer’s Comments: This is a fun
book! It is easy to read, entertaining,
even for adults, while being understandable down to a young age, and it has
good moral values and lessons in a non-didactic way. It is well-suited as a gift for any child who
can read, up to mid-teens.
Karin B
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