The book, written by Lisa Selvidge, is the second in the children’s fiction series The Magic Campervan, which follows the adventures of Merida the Magic Campervan as she takes families on journeys of wonder and discovery. “When my son was 15 months old, I bought a campervan and we travelled around Europe”, she told Central Magazine. “Merida, the Magic Campervan was born in a traffic jam on the M25 when it would have been quicker on a bike.”
Lisa’s love for stories began at a very young age. “Like most writers, I began writing by reading. I first read “Five on a Treasure Island” by the now almost forgotten Enid Blyton when I was seven, she recounted. “I still remember that magical moment when I found myself effortlessly immersed in another world by the act of reading. During the long summer school holidays, I would prefer to sit and read in my bedroom until my father would come in, hands on hips and say ‘You can’t sit there all day. Put that bloody book down, go out and play!’. But I was an only child and books were my friends, I didn’t want to go out and walk the streets on my own.”
Travelling the World
Her first book would begin blossoming while she travelled the world in her early adulthood. “It took me a long time to find my way”, she continued. “I lived in Switzerland, working with racehorses. In Berlin, I worked in an Irish pub and at the British cinema, reading Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse. In 1986, I moved to Japan, taught English essays, worked as a hostess in a bar and read all of Yukio Mishima. I visited Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, China, and the U.S. I travelled through the USSR on the Trans-Siberian which compounded my love of Russian literature.”
“The inspiration for my writing came from all the different worlds I’ve lived in, and the Magic Realist novels of Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabelle Allende and, lurking in the background, Mikhail Bulgakov and the dark realism of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol”, she added. “My fiction is eclectic, each book reflecting a different part of my life.”
When she became a mother, Lisa started writing children’s stories from her home in Monchique. “The Entelodont’s Skull” out now, opens in London Heathrow where Merida is picked up by Alfie and his two dads. They journey to Portugal in search of dinosaur fossils, where Alfie uncovers an Entelodont’s skull on Salema beach”, she described the plot of her latest release. “They need to keep the precious fossil from the hands of Humbert Berkham, who believes that this could be the key to a better life. Alfie and his new friend, Lilly, begin a quest to take the Entelodont’s skull into the Monchique mountains, where the wild boar, the Entelodont’s ancestors, are gathering.”
An exploration of childhood and parenting
“The Entelodont’s Skull” is an exploration of childhood and parenting in the modern era. “For kids today, as well as books, there is YouTube, TikTok, and video games. Being a parent is hard. This generation is very different, their external influences are much more powerful”, Lisa explained. “ADHD and neurodivergence are better understood but, arguably, exacerbated by exposure to technology. But remembering how reading was once thought of as bad for me, I stand at the door and try not to say to an only child, ‘You can’t sit there all day. Put that bloody phone down, go out and play!’ I don’t want him to walk the streets on his own.”
“But that, in part, is what The Magic Campervan is about: the realisation that we pass on the same stuff to our kids as was passed down to us and it is up to us to understand that it is not ours”, she elaborated. “Our parents are not to blame because they learned from their parents and so on. I try to do better but often fail, whereas Merida is more successful.”
The world around us is changing rapidly, and books that take that into account are essential for showing us how it’s changing and how to adapt. “I also wanted to write children’s books that are inclusive, accepting of non-traditional families, different cultures, set in different places and books that are relevant to the 2020s”, Lisa concluded. “They are, in essence, adventure stories, set in real time and incorporate both magic and the realities of phones and social media influences. For good and for bad, young kids seem surgically attached to their phones. A writer’s job is to reflect the world around them.”
“The Entelodont’s Skull” can be found alongside all her other books on Lisa’s website www.lisaselvidge.net, as well as select bookstores and “Enchanted”. She also teaches an online course for Oxford University called “Writing Lives”, and hosts a monthly writing workshop in Monchique.
Illustrations by Paula Watt