* St Jenni series

* Other Meg Harper Books (published by Lion)

* Grandma's Party (published by BRF)

* Reviews

All four of the My Mum books can be bought through my publisher's web site

Read about me on my publisher's site

Don't forget that
'My Mum and Other Horror Stories'
is available as an Audio Book

Read Kate's blog

‘The Mum’ series began because I had just spent a lot of time writing a long and rather sad book for teenagers which was going to be published but wasn’t in the end because of a change in publishing policy. I was absolutely gutted – and decided to write something funny in sheer rebellion.

I wanted to write something completely different – and then I fell in love with the characters I’d created. I also loved writing in Kate’s voice and, I’m afraid, started laughing at my own jokes.

I wanted to follow the family’s adventures further and got quite gleeful about creating challenges for them to overcome. There’s a lot of stuff in the books which is based on things that have happened me, so it was fun to inflict it all on a fictional family!

I also wanted to write about a boy and a girl who are very close friends but not boyfriend/girlfriend – or not yet anyway. I’ve always really enjoyed that sort of friendship myself and think it’s a bit sad that boys and girls often don’t relate in that way – they move onto the snogging etc too quickly!

That’s quite serious stuff to be writing about and, actually, there’s quite a lot of other serious stuff in these books too. I’m a Christian and wanted to write about things that I think are important spiritually and in the way we live our lives - like prayer, forgiveness, love etc – but I didn’t want to do it in a heavy way. And I didn’t want to make having a faith sound too easy – because it isn’t. The journal style and the humour help with all of this, I think.

I’'m really pleased to have written a fourth ‘Mum’ book and I've dedicated it to my former editor who gave me such encouragement!

I have loads of favourite passages in these books, both serious and funny. I love it in ‘Gruesome Twosome’ when Kate walks up and down the church with Comet, singing and listening to the rain and eventually, they both fall asleep. (P134-136) It’s a real ‘ah’ moment. But I love silly bits too. For some reason, I love it near the beginning of ‘Hound from Hell’ when Ben is talking to Kate with a face-pack on and in ‘Gruesome Twosome’ where she accuses him (P38) of auditioning for a boy band. They have the sort of edgy but basically good natured relationship with each other that I’d like to have had with a brother.

I don’t think there’s anything much I’d like to change about these books, although whenever you read a book you’ve written, you always find the odd bit that you realise you could have written better. I would quite like to change the titles if I could. I wanted them to be just ‘Big Bum Mum’, ‘Big Tum Mum’ and ‘Big Dumb Mum’ but they seemed a bit too rude. I suppose it’s better that the relationship between Mum and Kate gets a mention in the title as Kate is really the main character.

I’ve had some great reviews for these books but I like it best when I meet a kid who has read them and has really enjoyed them. E-mail me to let me know what you think!