The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories

I read this aloud to my eight-year-old grandson who has a great sense of humour and quite an imagination. So he loves the bizarre nature of some of Pratchett's writing. It's a series of short stories, so made good bedtime or early morning reading over a few days.

We loved the first story, which made both of us laugh aloud at times. It involved a conjurer who suddenly finds that he can do real magic... and doesn't know how to stop. It's cleverly written and appealed to us both.

We also very much liked the last story, about some gnomes, clearly the precursor to the wonderful Bromeliad trilogy ('Truckers', 'Diggers' and 'Wings') which my son read to my grandson a year or two back. However we found that the middle ones, while well-written show more and involving some creatively unusual situations, rather dragged in places and didn't have much story.

Intended for older children, and, in places, fun for adults too - but this is early Pratchett, not up to the standard of his longer books.

Longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2022/08/witch-s-vacuum-cleaner-terry-pratch... show less

A collection of humorous kids' stories written by Pratchett quite early in his career, although some of them were lightly edited by him later. Mostly they're fantasy stories featuring various kinds of magic and adventures (including an early version of what would later become the novel Truckers), but there's also a series of Wild West parodies set in rural Wales. They all feel a lot more uncomplicatedly silly than Pratchett's later stuff, including his later stuff for young readers, but I'm sure I would have found them enchanting as a kid, and as an adult I found them cute. The black and white illustrations are also pleasant, but I could have done without the weird typography. Pretty much every page has something like the word "up" show more raised higher than the rest of the text, or the word "big" in an extra-big font, or if a character is described as murmuring something, the word "murmured" is in extra-light text, that sort of thing. I'm sure the intention was to be clever and whimsical, and if you're just looking at the page rather than trying to read it, it seems fun, but it's done without much actual regard to the flow of the narrative, and it's really kind of distracting.

Rating: My inner child gives this a 4/5, typography notwithstanding. show less

Long before Terry Pratchett became Terry Pratchett! he was a journalist for the Buck's Free Press, writing short stories for their Children's Circle. This is a collection of some of those short stories, enhanced with illustrations by Mark Beech. It also includes commentary after each story by a Suzanne Bridson, though I'd not include that as an enhancement.

I found the stories charming in a Roald Dahl way, except I suspect Pratchett of imagination, whereas I sort of suspect Dahl of LSD abuse. They were funny, witty and there are hidden references to LOTR, C.S. Lewis' work, and hilarious homages to the Wild West, including Maverick. As I read, I kept thinking my nieces would find these fun, if I could get them to just try a story or two show more (they're reaching that age when the tastes of all adults tank and can't be trusted), and I must bring the collection to the attention of my sister-in-law who insists that teaching small children is fun.

The commentary was meh and in my opinion, skippable. Bridson is, I'm assuming, aiming it at the stories' audiences, and it's obviously meant to steer them towards the full novels. The comparisons she points out are the obvious ones, and she ignores almost all of the careful nuances and subtle wordplay that I appreciated most.

My edition is the slipcased one shown and it's beautiful. Inside I found it included a full colour illustration from Mark Beech, on postcard sized stock, slipped between the pages, a pleasant bonus. show less

Similar to the "Lost Stories" in A Stroke of the Pen, these are short stories Pratchett wrote for newspapers long ago when he was a very young author and/or journalist. I tagged it satire because one story about Britain's "Wild West" (across the border in Wales, where a Coal Rush brought lawless sorts into town) is amusement, but multiple stories riffing on the Wild West theme finally made me realize that satire, or parody, was afoot.

These are the stories Sir Terry looked back on, owned up to, edited, and wrote an Introduction to. (The Lost Stories, unearthed from newspaper archives and published posthumously, got a Foreword by Neil Gaiman and an Introduction by Colin Smythe.) The first tale of Wild West antics appears in both books, show more in slightly different forms due to Sir Terry's revisions, but that seems to be the extent of the overlap.

The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner is the title story: the machine itself is a hopelessly hackneyed and no longer funny cliche which I found annoying when I was a child of ten, but the actual dilemma in the story is wildly amusing. A stage magician offends an actual witch and is cursed with a spell causing him to do real magic accidentally every time he touches something. As I look back, I realize that I found the concept of a modern witch on an electric vacuum cleaner extremely funny at the age of eight, so that's my first summer-vacation plan: read this story to my two eight-year-old grandsons.

A cute book, worth keeping to hand to youngsters who may be potential future Discworld fans. And a fun read for older youngsters who are already Discworld fans. show less

This is the second volume of short stories for children that Pratchett wrote in his younger years -- from 1966-1973. This was another joyful collection, full of humor and friendship and, in this one, the wild west of England -- Wales. And, while every story in Dragons at Crumbling Castle was equally fun, this book actually had a couple of stories that stood out and that I would call favorites.

"The Truly Terrible Toothache" is hilarious, in that a librarian accidentally brings an Elizabethan magician to the present day and he starts changing the town and the people into what he remembers. The librarian fights his hardest to not let his language change so that he won't forget he's a modern man. It has the funniest dialogue and a cute show more twist.

"The Blackbury Park Statues" was so incredibly sweet. The statues in a park are alive and, when an older woman who has been coming to the park her whole life to feed the ducks stops coming, they miss her and go on a quest to find out what's wrong.

To be honest, I think this collection is actually stronger than the first. That isn't what I was expecting at all. What a pleasant surprise!

http://webereading.com/2018/03/marchmagics-dwjmarch-week-2-roundup.html show less

The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner - Pratchett
Audio performance by J. Rhind -Tutt
5 stars

This is a handful of early Terry Pratchett short stories. So much fun. It was a bit dangerous to be driving while laughing so hard. I wish this had been around when my children were young. The audio is very well done and it might have been a good car ride distraction. Although I doubt that they could have appreciated the humor of the ongoing tales of the Wild Western Wales township of Llandanffmnfafegettupagogo. It did have great appeal for someone who grew up watching Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

A shorter short story collection from Pratchett's archives, but one that is very well curated. I love the recurrences of the Wild West Wales stories and some of the other repeating adventures throughout.

Advanced Reader's copy provided by Edelweiss.