We read the series a chapter a night: first Truckers, then Diggers, then Wings. When they figured out that the weird stop-motion animation that transfixed their six-year-old child for five minutes every night was based on a book, they tracked down the lone copy of Terry Pratchett’s Truckers in the Wangaratta city library. My parents didn’t know what they had started. Calla Wahlquist: Terry Pratchett taught me to read

“There was one about monkeys savaging her in Barbados,” volunteered my sister when I recently asked her about them. None of these texts remain but I remember them involving a lot of cackling. Set in the future after Animal Ark, in which Mandy and James were unhappily married, every story concluded with James conspiring with Mandy’s resentful animal companions to bring about her death. Baglio” (a New Yorker!) ranks high among my most character-forming childhood disappointments.Īnimal Ark might not have been one woman’s labour of love but my genuine affection for the books did inspire my own: Mandy is Murdered, a gory spin-off series totalling some tens of thousands of words, which I co-authored with my younger sister. The discovery that Lucy Daniels was not a particularly prolific, animal-loving author in the English countryside but rather a “collection of authors under the direction of Ben M. Defined by their alliterative titles – Kittens in the Kitchen, Pony on the Porch, Puppies in the Pantry etc (an exception was made for the Australian special edition, Koalas in a Crisis, which I remember thinking was a cop-out at the time) – 62 books about their adventures were written from 1994 by “Lucy Daniels”. From about the age of eight I devoured the Animal Ark series about Mandy, the wholesome daughter of two country vets, and her animal-related adventures with her best friend, James.

Anastasia krupnik book series