She decides to call on him at his home and ask for help. She has long felt that an older boy at school, Sorensen Carlisle (known as “Sorry”), is something of a witch, and she’s often found him looking at her, as though he knows she knows. The only thing to do, then, is for Laura to get help for Jacko in her own way. As Kate says: “It’s not that we’re poor… But we’re usually short.” I particularly like how Mahy puts it when an unexpected expense comes up, and Kate “gritted her teeth in financial agony”.) (Laura and Jacko’s father went off with another woman, leaving the family in something just above poverty.

Laura is a part-Maori girl of 14 who takes care of her 3-year-old brother Jacko after school while her mother Kate runs the local branch of a chain bookstore. (The novel was initially published with the subtitle, “A Supernatural Romance”, though that seems to have been dropped in modern editions.) According to her postscript to the 2003 Modern Classics edition, it started out as the story of an 11-year-old girl who sought the help of a somewhat witchy girl of her own age to save her younger brother from a supernatural menace, but that story faltered until Mahy changed the witchy girl to an older (though still witchy) boy, and upped the protagonist’s age to 14, introducing an element of incipient sexuality to the mix.

The Carlisles inform Laura that to defeat a powerful magician like Carmody, she’ll have to become a witch herself, undergoing a potentially dangerous transformation.The Changeover (1984) is Margaret Mahy’s second YA novel, and her second Carnegie Medal Winner (following The Haunting in 1982). To save her brother, Laura gets help from a handsome classmate, Sorensen Carlisle (Nicholas Galitzine), who comes from a long line of witches - including his mother Miryam ( Lucy Lawless). Then an unsettlingly friendly stranger, Carmody Braque ( Timothy Spall), casts a spell on the boy, and begins sapping his life force. The impressive young actress Erana James plays the teen, Laura Chant, a low-level psychic who spends much of her days anxiously fretting about her rambunctious younger brother Jacko, while their divorced mother ( Melanie Lynskey) works long hours at a bookstore. It’s taken a while for Margaret Mahy’s beloved, award-winning 1984 young-adult novel “The Changeover” to make it to the big screen but the writer-director team of Miranda Harcourt and Stuart McKenzie have given the book an astute adaptation, balancing magical arcana with everyday adolescent turmoil.

The changeover by margaret mahy