The Night of Wishes: Or the Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion

by Michael Ende (Author) Regina Kehn (Illustrator)

Reading Level: 4th − 5th Grade

From the author of The Neverending Story, a book that reminds us that "magic--be it good or bad--is no simple matter."

It's New Year's Eve at the Villa Nightmare but Beelzebub Preposteror is in no mood for celebration. As the Shadow Sorcery Minister, Preposteror has a duty to perform a certain number of evil deeds in service to the Minister of Pitch Darkness. But this year, to his horror, he's nowhere near meeting that quota. Preposteror has all but given up when who should make an unexpected visit but his aunt, the witch Tyrannia Vampirella.

She has come with a diabolical proposal that just might be the solution to Preposterer's dilemma: together they will brew the fabled Notion Potion, "one of the most ancient and powerful evil spells in the universe," and their every evil wish will be granted. The only thing that stands in their way is a most unlikely team--a cat named Mauricio di Mauro and a raven known as Jacob Scribble, who have just hours to thwart the plans of their sorcerer masters and save the world from destruction.

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School Library Journal

Gr 4-7--Shadow Sorcery Minister Beelzebub Preposteror receives a visit from the underworld informing him that he has not achieved his yearly quota of pestilence, pollution, and misery. Turns out his greedy aunt Tyrannia Vampirella suffers the same deficit. Tyrannia proposes concocting the Satanarchaeolidealcohellish potion which, if drunk entirely before midnight on New Year's Eve, allows all spoken wishes to be granted in reverse. These backward wishes will serve the further purpose of fooling Mauricio the cat and Jacob the raven, spies from the animal High Council into thinking Preposteror and Tyrannia wish everyone good, not evil. Mauricio and Jacob catch on to the deception and venture out of Villa Nightmare to save the world with no real strategy. Ende (1929-1995), author of The Neverending Story, first published this book in 1989, and Schwarzbauer and Takvorian present this superb German translation. It's C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters meets a Roald Dahl animal story. Pompous Mauricio and bumbling Jacob's tentative bravery fades in comparison to the squishy, gleeful nastiness of the potion makers with their dark magical expertise. Wordplay and nonsense rhymes add to their macabre plotting. Ende's fantasy seems less safe than current counterpoints. Only the potion makers' gratuitous--and mildly hilarious--backstabbing allows good a victory. Clocks drawn in the text mark the swift passage of time and add dramatic tension. Kehn's black-and-white illustrations, full of movement and magic, sometimes seem muddy without proper contrast. VERDICT Snarky sorcerers will enchant fantasy readers who can traverse sophisticated linguistic hijinks.--Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Review quotes

"Good confronts evil in a comic adventure spiced with rambunctious wordplay and deepened by allusions to the world's real afflictions. Clever and highly imaginative." —Kirkus Reviews

"A potent dose of comic fantasy, bubbling over with clever wordplay and slapstick incidents, and spiked with verse." —Publishers Weekly

"Envy the parents who get to read it aloud at bedtime, facing the challenge of voicing larger-than-life characters...Ende revels in zany details and little asides. The tone of amused horror is well sustained in this playful translation...Amid the gags comes meaning, particularly when a cat arrives at a new understanding of his life, and when we witness the destruction of nature. It all ends in an operatic aria. And why not? Michael Ende also likes to keep his readers thinking." —Eileen Battersby, TLS
Michael Ende
Michael Ende (1929-1995) was born into an artistic family in Bavaria, Germany. As a young man during the Second World War, he joined the anti-Nazi resistance rather than enlist in the army, as his teenage classmates were then being required to do. After the war, he finished high school and enrolled in drama school, hoping for a career as a playwright and actor. For the next few years he worked in regional theater and wrote plays and cabaret scripts. He also met his future wife, the actor Ingeborg Hoffmann. Ende found surprise success with the 1960 publication of his first children's book, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver. He would go on to write many plays, essays, poems, and books--including Momo (1973) and The Neverending Story (1979)--which have been translated into more than forty languages and sold millions of copies around the world. He lived with his first wife in Italy for sixteen years until her death, and traveled extensively in Japan with his second wife, Mariko Satō, who was also his Japanese translator.

Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian have collaborated on two translations of books by the German literary critic and novelist Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day's News and What Remains and Other Stories.

Regina Kehn has illustrated editions of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, as well as books by Michael Ende, Daniil Kharms, Cornelia Funke, Otfried Preussler, and Franz Kafka, among others. She is based in Hamburg, Germany.
Classification
Fiction
ISBN-13
9781681371887
Lexile Measure
-
Guided Reading Level
-
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Publication date
October 03, 2017
Series
-
BISAC categories
JUV037000 - Juvenile Fiction | Fantasy & Magic
JUV017080 - Juvenile Fiction | Holidays & Celebrations | Other, Non-Religious
JUV067000 - Juvenile Fiction | Thrillers & Suspense
Library of Congress categories
Magic
Paranormal fiction
Wizards
Humorous fiction
JUVENILE FICTION / Holidays & Celebrations /
JUVENILE FICTION / Fantasy & Magic
Suoernatural

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