Early one morning, before the sun is even up, Dorrie - that little witch with the mismatched socks and crooked hat - finds herself awakened by the Big Witch, and informed that the entire household is heading to the Witches' Camp at Lake Eerie. Determined to gather the herbs she needs, the Big Witch dismisses the reports of the frightened Glumglen witches, who claim to have encountered bears and sea monsters in the area. Predictably, her blithe disregard for any warning results in an adventure involving a magical adversary - Morzo, the Magician of Machines, in this case - whom Dorrie must step in to defeat...

The seventeenth entry in Patricia Coombs' twenty-book series about this adorable little witch, her black cat Gink, and her many entanglements with ill-meaning magical practitioners, Dorrie and the Witches' Camp is (unlike so many of the other titles) not a book I have any memory of encountering, as a young girl. I therefore greatly enjoyed reading this new (to me) story, although somehow, a little bit of the usual magic seemed to be missing. Perhaps because the story here seems more science-fiction than fantasy, with Morzo's many machines, and that felt like something of a departure from the magical quality of the rest of the books? In any case, although I wouldn't rank this with my favorite Dorrie books, it is still immensely engaging, with the same delightful illustrations, done mostly in black and white, with occasional color accents, that have so delighted me in the previous books! ( )