Cork author is back with  latest book about trouble-magnet Milly

Milly McCarthy And The Irish Dancing Disaster, by Leona Forde (Gill Books €9.99)

THIS time will be completely different, Milly McCarthy just knows it.

It won’t be like the time she wanted to take up juggling because she thought joining a travelling circus would be an amazing adventure. Nor when she took up the didgeridoo to become a star in Australia, or tried to learn Japanese to get a job in a sushi restaurant, nor even the time when she joined a Brazilian jiu-jitsu club because she had watched The Karate Kid and decided she wanted to become a black-belt ninja spy.

No, since the day when Abbie Horgan down the road brought her shiny Munster medal in to show off at school, Milly has set her heart on becoming a world champion Irish dancer and absolutely nothing is going to stand in her way.

She’s even got a totally well worked-out plan as to how she’s going to achieve this feat, with step one being the purchase of a curly wig, and step two entering a competition.

After being advised by her BFF Laura that dancing lessons might be a better first step, Milly then has the job of persuading her parents that this is not merely the latest in her long list of passing fads.

Catching Dad off guard when he is not really listening, Milly manages to get him to agree to signing her up to dancing lessons, to which Mam, “after lots of tutting and eye-rolling and giving Dad the ‘you should have known better’ look”, finally accedes.

Contrary to expectations, Milly shows promise as a dancer, and after practising hard, is soon ready to enter her first open feis, complete with her very own curly wig, poodle socks, and a fancy frock.

What could possibly go wrong, one might ask, but readers who encountered this Cork trouble-magnet in her first adventure, Milly McCarthy Is A Complete Catastrophe, will already know the answer: Lots.

From there on in, things start to go pear-shaped, and when Milly finds herself subbed at short notice into a three-hand dance group, complete chaos is close at hand.

Vomit, physical injuries, and flying knickers ensue, though despite having a magnetic attraction for mayhem, Milly manages to emerge as an engaging character whose misadventures are simply the unfortunate consequence of her many good intentions.

The second in the Milly series from Ballyphehane native Leona Forde, an English teacher at Kinsale Community School, this is Wimpy Kid humour for Gaelscoil girls, with Milly’s imperfections a central part of the book’s appeal.

Forde, who studied English at UCC, taps into a distinctively Irish brand of mirth, which parents who have entered the bizarre orange-tanned, sock-glued world of the dancing feis will enjoy just as much as will the book’s age eight-plus target readership.

The screeching accordion recordings and glittery tracksuits of Ms Lillian Vivien O’Brien’s school of Irish dancing ring painfully true, though Forde’s reference to PTSD to describe the fate of Milly’s dancing competition judge is not likely to be a laughing matter for those who actually suffer from the disorder.

Sprinkled with the cúpla focal of Milly’s classmates at Scoil Eoin in the fictional Cork town of Ballybrogin, and of their long-suffering múinteoir Emer, whose always-about-to-give-out expression is perfectly captured by Dublin illustrator Karen Harte, the latest escapades of redhead rebel Milly will be published on September 14, with a third instalment already in the pipeline.

Search For The Black Mirror (Usborne €11.20) the second title in Kilkenny author Helena Duggan’s The Light Thieves series, picks up where its predecessor left off, in a world where a black spot is gradually covering the sun and three friends must find a strange black mirror in order to avert the looming catastrophe.

Grian, Jeffrey, and Shelli know tech giant Howard Hansom is somehow responsible for the theft of the sun, after the world was apparently tilted on its axis by a major earthquake. 

Hansom managed to persuade people to move to his Tipping Point city in order to shift the world back in place with their combined weight.

With tech used to track and control the population, the trio must try and complete their mission without resorting to Hansom’s smart devices, while in Trumpian fake-news fashion, Hansom twists the truth to brainwash citizens into believing that it is the three youngsters themselves who are the cause of the eco-disaster. A gripping matrix of environmental and social themes for our time.