The best books about exceptional children with amazing experiences

I’ve always felt that deep down I must be a witch or sorceress, and that in ages gone by I would have been like Juniper, the herbalist, magician, and wonderful woman who dared to live alone, up on the moorland, far from the Scottish village where "Wise Child" lived.

I identified so closely with both Juniper and her new apprentice, taken into her care to protect her from her evil mother, that I couldn’t stop reading. I could have been "Wise Child," running away from her accepted, normal life to a world of magic and healing.

I love the descriptions of the way Juniper lives, the herbs, the mixtures, the rituals, and all the other characters who bring the terrifying story to life. And there’s a wonderful prequel too.

I was a clever child too, ridiculed at my horrible boarding school and constantly afraid of showing off and being laughed at.

But I did not have it half as bad as Roald Dahl’s desperately abused Matilda. Perhaps this is why I loved this book, for taking a child I could so closely identify with and getting her to suffer and overcome it all in the magical ways Matilda does.

A fabulous read, to be read many times and enjoyed again and again.

No book has lasted in my imagination like Alice in Wonderland – not just for reading myself but for reading to my children and then rereading myself.

Her adventures summon up my own psychedelic experiences, my failed attempts to find evidence for the paranormal, and my own adventures into the further reaches of the human mind. I love the bizarre events which can happen only in dreams and yet…and yet…they are somehow part of our ordinary experience too. 

Then there are the poems and songs. I learnt many by heart – "You are old father William," and "Twinkle, twinkle little bat."

Everyone should read Alice in Wonderland and feel as full of wonder as Alice does.

What I love about this book is that Christopher is such an unusual child and sees the world in ways that most of us do not.

In reading this bizarre and disturbing mystery story, we begin to see the world differently ourselves. I like, too, the fact that what is different about him is never named – it’s not some specific diagnosis or categorization – he is just Christopher, the odd, mathematically gifted, strangely reacting, teenager.

When he becomes terrified of what we might take as quite ordinary events and places, I begin to feel some of his difference – to feel what it might be like to be so much an outsider. It helped me to remember that we are all different.

I had to include this first Harry Potter book because Harry is the epitome of a gifted child and I loved these books from the first.

When my own book, The Meme Machine, came out in 1999, someone rang me excitedly to tell me that my book was number 5 on Amazon!!! (There were not so many books listed on Amazon in those days!!).

I was so thrilled that, of course, I had to find out what the top four were. And guess what – they were the hardback and paperback versions of the first two Harry Potter books, which I’d never even heard of. I bought them immediately and never looked back, receiving each one in the post on its publication day.

What terrific books they were and are.