12/10/2025
With heartfelt appreciation to the Outstanding Creator Awards for this phenomenal, beautifully written, and deeply insightful review of Horrifa’s Magic Makeover: Witch Way to the Ball? by Susan L. Krueger, illustrated by Nadia Komorova.
Thank you for recognizing both the humor and the emotional heart of the story—its themes of beauty, belonging, individuality, and self-acceptance. Your thoughtful interpretation and attention to the deeper message surrounding beauty standards, self-worth, and authenticity is truly meaningful. Reviews like yours help stories reach the readers who need them most. I am deeply grateful.
📚 Order your copy on Amazon:
👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FB3R32KY/ref=syn_sd_onsite_desktop_0?ie=UTF8&psc=1&pd_rd_plhdr=t&aref=2LelY9K9Qd
https://www.outstandingcreator.com/reviews/review-of-horrifas-magic-makeover-by-susan-l-krueger
Horrifas Magic Makeover by Susan L. Krueger joins Frankinschool by Caryn Rivadeneira as one of the most charming and beloved middle-grade novels to come our way!
Are you a fan of fairy-tales and lighthearted stories featuring magic? You might have noticed that witches are often portrayed as the nasty, no-good villains, tricksters, troublemakers, and evildoers in these stories. They're often referred to as mean, ugly, and/or evil. They're often given exaggerated and grotesque features like wiry or frizzy hair, wrinkly skin (often an otherworldly color like green), menacing feline eyes, a wart or two, and—of course—a long, protruding nose with a hairy mole on it.
It's like creators go out of their way to portray witches as ugly, undesirable, and inhuman as they possibly can.
Well, imagine flipping the script on the tales of "mean, ugly, evil" witches.
Imagine putting yourself in their shoes, Taking on their perspective. Imagine seeing humanity and the world as they see them.
We might see witches as scary and an eyesore, but how might they perceive us?
What if they see us normies in a similar way to how we perceive and portray them? In other words, imagine a world in which witches see themselves as the gorgeous, desirable, and liberated ones while humans are hideous, undesirable, and self-limiting.
What's gross to us is delectable to them. What's ugly to us is beautiful to them.
It's actually a fascinating and thought-provoking concept!
And it's executed with so much tact and care.
At the heart of this book is Horrifa, a young witch who is already considered stunning in her own world (among witches). She has green, scaly skin, wild root like hair, smoke on her breath, and a lovely collection of warts. To her mother, Dragunda, this is peak beauty. To Horrifa, at least for a while, it is something to hide. She has fallen under the spell of a mortal fairy tale about a prince’s ball and smooth, pink, twirly princesses. She wants to look like them, fit in with them, and win the prince’s attention. In other words, she wants to trade in her culture’s idea of beauty for someone else’s.
The way the book explores that wish is both hilarious and sharp. Horrifa and Dragunda do not just wave a wand and turn her into a princess. They cobble together a “mortal makeover” using witch logic. Horrifa brews a potion to change her eye color. She slathers herself with a bone and moonlight paste so she can be pale and smooth. She dyes her hair with seaweed to get golden locks. Dragunda, grumbling but devoted, sneaks out to solve the “pink ball gown” problem and comes home with one of the strangest dresses in children’s literature, stitched out of stolen pig snouts. It is gross. It is ridiculous. It is also very, very funny.
What really works is that the joke is always on the idea of a single, correct way to be beautiful, not on Horrifa herself. Dragunda never stops telling her how gorgeous she is as a witch. The insults are aimed at mortals. They are “small,” “pale,” “smooth,” and “silly.” The book lets kids see how strange and arbitrary our own standards might look from the outside. We call pointy chins and hooked noses “ugly,” but in witch culture those same traits are dazzling. That reversal lands so well because the author never drops the emotional truth underneath. Horrifa’s longing is real and understandable. Most kids will recognize that feeling of wanting to look like the people in a story or on a screen.
The adventure that follows keeps pushing that theme. Getting to the ball turns into a whole sequence of chaotic, inventive witch solutions. Eggston the lake monster becomes a taxi service. A golden coach is “borrowed” with a cloud of ashy smoke that makes the mortal girls think it is on fire. Dragunda scares the horses into bolting. The result is not a graceful entrance at the top of a staircase but a crash into a swamp. Horrifa’s carefully built costume literally falls apart in the muck. Her night of perfection is gone. The way the book handles that disappointment is lovely. Dragunda fixes what she can, undoes the pig snout theft with a witty spell, and then offers Horrifa a different way to experience the ball.
The chandelier scene is probably the emotional peak. Horrifa and her mother transform into bats and hang from the ceiling to watch the party from above. Instead of sweeping romance, they see crowded guests, braggy princesses, and a prince who is more fussy than charming. The famous ball is noisy, superficial, and honestly less magical than a good witch jamboree. Horrifa’s fantasy runs right into reality, and you can feel her quietly recalibrating. She is not “settling” when she chooses to go home. She is finally seeing clearly that her world, her body, and her life are already special. That is a powerful note for kids, especially for any child who has tried to squeeze into someone else’s idea of “pretty.”
On the craft side, this feels like a strong pick for confident young readers or as a read aloud for slightly younger ones. The vocabulary is rich, the sentences are descriptive, and there is a lot of text per page, so it skews older middle grade rather than early chapter book. The black and white art, with its thin lines and expressive faces, supports the spooky comedy mood and sprinkles in fun background details like spiders, bats, and cats. If there is one mild caveat, it is that the makeover preparations take up a big chunk of the book. Very impatient readers might wonder when they will finally get to the ball. The payoff is worth it, however, and the slow build helps the final “this is not as great as I imagined” moment feel earned.
This book has a certain choppiness, randomness, and chaos to it. A lot happens in a lot of different locations over the course of only 90 pages. For example, there's a moment when Horrifa just so happens to gain the help of a lake monster, Eggston. However, even that isn't arbitrary. It's earned, as things should be in stories. See, Eggston's help wasn't just something that happened out of nowhere, it's something that Horrifa earned with her kindness and compassion by helping to take a hook out of the lake monster's mouth in the past. This really shows that despite the way Horrifa and her mother might look to humans (like a monster), she is the opposite of a monster on the inside.
This book repeatedly and effectively reiterates the message that beauty comes from the inside and that you should always be yourself, not anyone else.
You know, there's a nuance to this book that we think might be missed by more shallow readers. This book isn't just a funny, weird, zany story with colorful, charimatic characters, it actually says a lot. It's a commentary on beauty standards. You could even stretch this out to things like body dysmorphia and other body/beauty image struggles.
Let's face it, we've all opened a magazine or saw someone on TV and said, "I want to look like that" or "I wish I looked like that." We've all walked away saying to ourselves, "Why am I so fat?" or "Why am I so short?" or "Why is my hair not straight and/or curly enough?" or "Why are my muscles so small?" or "Why is my butt so big and/or small?" or "Why are my breasts so big and/or small?" or "Why am I not as beautiful and/or handsome like so-and-so or such-and-such." That's what Horrifa is experiencing. She wants the blue eyes, bright hair, and white skin of the human girls in the magazines—well, in this case, the fairy-tale books.
What's ironic about all of this is that all those wacky, gross-sounding things that the witches use for their beauty solutions and makeup aren't too dissimilar from makeup, which is made of stuff like fish.
When you really stop to think about it, makeup is also a kind of socially approved potion making. Grown ups smear on creams that sting, paint their faces with powders and liquids, glue on false lashes, dye their hair with chemicals that smell like something from a lab, even let people poke them with needles so they can look a certain way. In witch culture, rat milk, bilious yellow dye, and beet stained feet are glamorous. In ours, it is contour sticks, chemical peels, and injections. The book is quietly asking the question: who decided which version was normal and which was disgusting, and why do we obey those rules so faithfully?
Horrifa’s blue eye drops are one of our favorite details because they dramatize how powerful that kind of conditioning can be. She literally changes how she sees the world, then panics when reality no longer matches the ideal in her head. That is what happens when we internalize beauty standards too deeply. We start to misread the mirror. The genius of this book is that it wraps that idea in jokes about pig snouts and lake monsters so kids can feel it before they ever have to put adult words to it.
Anyway, this is a book about being your genuine self and moving past the noise.
Outstanding Creator Awards
