Ross’s second book was published in December 2016. It’s a funny and gripping tale of a 12 year-old girl, Ethel, who accidentally stumbles upon the secret of invisibility while seeking a cure for her acne.
You’d think it would be fun, being invisible. But Ethel is soon thrown into a heart-stopping adventure when she discovers that she is not actually who she thought she was
With a lively supporting cast including a centenarian great-grandmother and a pair of teenage twin villains, Invisible provides thrills and laughs with an emotional core that will appeal to readers of both sexes and all ages.
What Not To Do If You Turn Invisible It is published in the UK by Harper Collins
Readers in the UK can buy What Not To Do If You Turn Invisible here
Readers in the US may order from Amazon (US). It is published in the US by Schwartz & Wade (Penguin Random House).
The “difficult second book”…
I’ll be honest – there were times when I thought, fleetingly, that perhaps I was destined to write only one book. That Time Travelling With A Hamster would have its brief moment in the limelight and then gracefully move along the bookshelf to make room for books by other, more prolific and successful authors.
I would tell myself that Harper Lee wrote only one book, To Kill A Mockingbird. (Then I’d remember Go Set A Watchman and feel a little sad.)
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind was also a one-off, written in 1936, that still sells 75,000 copies a year.
(Incidentally, Mockingbird and GWTW both one-offs, both set in the US deep south, both won the Pullitzer Prize.)
Anyway, the doubts were necessarily momentary as I had a contract to fulfill with HarperCollins and – in hindsight – the problem was not that I couldn’t think of a story to write, but that the initial, enthusiastic reception to Hamster had somewhat intimidated me. And if I felt that with the modest success of Hamster imagine what poor Harper Lee felt when her first ever book won the world’s most-coveted literary prize and was set by exam boards the world over.
Anyway, it’s done and I’m thrilled with it. I say “done”: it’s in the final editing stage, where metaphors are unmixed, characterisations sharpened with a word here and there, plot holes that have survived so far are identified and filled in (or disguised), and the copy-editor says things like, “she can’t put it in her jeans pocket because you said five pages ago that she was wearing a skirt.” I owe an awed debt to my brilliant editors.
The cover, once again, is by the wonderful Tom Clohosy Cole. It really matches Hamster. In fact, it looks just like a collection of books by an author should look. Which means I’d better get cracking on book three…
RW August 2016
Update: What Not To Do If You Turn Invisible has become a favourite in schools, and people often tell me they think it is the funniest of my books. It received the prestigious “Book Of The Year: award in Germany from Kinderbuch-couch.de in 2018
Could I be invisible…?
Not yet, is the short and, regrettably, truthful answer.
In What Not To Do If You Turn Invisible, Ethel becomes invisible thanks to a combination of an untested skin medicine (“Dr Chang His Skin So Clear”) and a broken-down tanning bed.
Of course, it’s all made up: there is nothing yet known to science that will turn you invisible. Yet that is not to say that scientists are not working on it…
Nature, however, is – as so often – way ahead of us. Many creatures have developed the ability to be virtually invisible so that they are not spotted by predators. Check out these pictures by the wildlife photographer Art Wolfe. Until you know what you’re looking for, the animals are to all intents and purposes invisible.
The first is a leopard, the second is a giraffe, the third is a snow-white bird. Even when you know what to look for they are hard to spot!
So this is camouflage, rather than true invisibility, but it is almost as good.
Soldiers have been using camouflage to evade detection for…well, forever, really. (In Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the soldiers of Malcolm’s army attempt to disguise themselves as a small forest by holding branches in front of themselves.)
Military scientists have long been working on ways to make weapons and troops invisible. We already have “stealth” aircraft – that is, aeroplanes that cannot be detected by things like radar (although they are perfectly visible if you stand next to them!)
Frustratingly, so far true invisibility – both for objects and people – remains in the realms of fiction.
Stories about invisible people are plentiful and ancient. Plato, writing in Greece around 400BC, tells a story of the “Ring of Gyges” which will render the wearer invisible.
H.G. Wells, sometimes called “the father of science fiction”, wrote The Invisible Man in 1897. In honour of Wells, I gave Ethel’s doctor the same name as the doctor in The Invisible Man – Dr Kemp.
Easily my favourite book about invisibility, though, is Memoirs Of An Invisible Man by H.F Saint. Published in 1987 it was a huge hit. It was made into a not-very-good film starring Chevy Chase and made H.F Saint a lot of money: so much, in fact, that he did not write another book and retired.
There is a bit in What Not To Do If You Turn Invisible when invisible Ethel is detected by her footprints in a shaggy carpet. I borrowed that from Memoirs Of An Invisible Man. (I hope H.F Saint doesn’t mind!)
