Book Adventurers: James Nicol
This summer, we’re asking children – where will you go?
To become a book adventurer this summer, all children have to do is download our free make-at-home passport. Once they’ve started reading and checking places off their lists, they can cut out the stamps included in the passport pack and glue them in. We’ve left space to write on each stamp where you’ve traveled that week – whether it’s Narnia, the circus or the wild plains of Africa!
To help them and you get inspired, we’ve asked some brilliant children’s authors to tell us about the book that never failed to take them to another world when they were children. In today’s post, we hear from children’s author James Nicol!
Redwall by Brian Jacques
I recall a very hot summer from childhood when I was probably about ten or eleven and I picked up a copy of Redwall by Brian Jacques in our local bookshop. It was always dark and cool in there on hot days and seemed full of magic and potential. The cover caught my attention immediately: the majestic Redwall Abbey in the distance, with a hoard of nasty rats all dressed in armour marching to attack. The idea captured my imagination at once, a quick flick inside and I saw there was a map (I LOVE maps in books!), and I was sold there and then.
Our garden wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it was a nice place to read on a hot day and I found myself totally lost in this small world full of big adventures, brave animal heroes and villains of all shapes, sizes and indeed species!
The community of Redwall welcomes you in with a great big badger hug and feeds you the most deliciously mouth-watering food. Brian always went to great lengths to describe the food the characters ate (and they ate a LOT of it!), and then asks you to stand beside your new friends to defend Redwall and the characters that live there, assured that good would always triumph and that there would be (another) feast at the end of it all.
Just thinking of the book now, I can recall the smell of the garden on those long warm summer days. I’m quite a slow reader and the Redwall books were some of the longest I’d read at that age so it kept me going for a few weeks – and then I was overjoyed to discover another book in the series and another and another after that. I was reading well into the next summer just from that first adventure!
James Nicol has loved books and stories his whole life. As a child he spent hours absorbed in novels, watching epic 1980s cartoons or adventuring in the wood at the bottom of the garden. He lives on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens with his partner and a black cockapoo called Bonnie. Follow him on Twitter @JamesENicol and find out more about The Apprentice Witch on his website.
