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London, Feb.14 (ANI): Harry Potter faces competition. Impatient young readers waiting until June for J. K. Rowling's fifth Harry Potter novel, can also start looking forward to the publication of Lionboy, the first fantasy adventure by another single mother, Louisa Young, who has signed what is said to be a one million pound book deal with Puffin.
Lionboy is to be published in October and looks set to be big. Several publishers joined in the auction for the trilogy, half of which is unwritten, about a boy who was scratched by a leopard as a baby and so can "speak cat", both the wild and domestic dialects. Puffin won the day and now the bidding has begun for the film rights, says a report in The Age.
Not only do the books bring another single mother into the spotlight, and introduce a new hero in Charlie, whose dreadlocks may soon be as recognisable as Harry Potter's glasses, they also mark the debut of a new literary figure: Isabel Adomakoh Young, Louisa's 10-year-old daughter and co-writer.
Isabel must be one of the youngest literary earners since another English writer, Daisy Ashford, had a book she wrote as a nine-year-old, The Young Visitors, published in 1919.
Rather than burden the books' spines with the names of both mother and daughter, they have written under the name Zizou Corder - borrowed from Isabel's pet lizard.
Ever since she can remember, she and Isabel have added to the population of their west London home by inventing characters. Make-believe is their way of passing time; one story she remembers was about a lonely eyelash - "a way of getting Isabel to shut her eyes" - and another about a dugong, "a wonderful animal, like a manatee".
Six years ago, they began devising elaborate stories about Charlie Ashanti, the boy who talks to lions, when Louisa found herself stuck with the plot for one of her novels. "Why don't you write our stories down?" suggested Isabel. So she did, complete with maps and diagrams that should delight the eight to 13-year-olds at whom the books will be aimed. (ANI)