What were the childhood books that inspired these successful authors to write?

Francesca Simon – ‘Half Magic’ by Edward Eager

_”I was nine years old when I discovered Edward Eager’s fantastic books about four children’s magic adventures. Half Magic was the first. Katherine, Jane, Mark and Martha pick up a coin on the way to the library. They think it’s an ordinary nickel, but gradually discover, after a series of misadventures, that it’s a magic coin.

The catch is, it only grants half your wish. So, when the youngest, Martha, is sick of being bossed around by her siblings, she wishes she weren’t there. Half of her remains, the other flits about wrecking ghostly havoc on the town. I used the idea of an unpredictable magic coin in my book Helping Hercules. And of course, the squabbling children definitely inspired Horrid Henry.

I was intrigued by the idea of magic’s wilfulness: that magic got fed up, that magic wasn’t controllable, that magic happened here on earth, not on a planet far, far away. I also loved the range of adventures, from fighting pirates to—unknowingly—meeting their future children on a desert island. What was even better was having the same scene again in a later book, this time from their children’s point of view, a trick I used in my novels The Sleeping Army and The Monstrous Child.

The books enthralled me. The children were unlike story-book children: they fought and argued, their widowed mother had big money troubles, they were bookish and imaginative. If magic could happen to them, an ordinary family, it could happen to anyone. Perhaps even to me.”