There’s a particular kind of grown-up that every child deserves to have in their life. Not necessarily a grandparent by blood, though it certainly can be one, but someone older, someone patient, someone who has lived long enough to have collected a few good secrets, and who is willing, eventually, to share them. In The Magical Dumligo, I call this person Gramps. But really, I think every child needs one.
Gramps is one hundred years old when the story opens. He has spent a century quietly carrying the memory of the most extraordinary adventure of his life: a purple mist, a hidden island, a shapeshifting cyclops, a three-horned creature that could turn into weapons no one else could see. And on his hundredth birthday, surrounded by family, he chooses his great-granddaughter Lucy as the one he’ll finally tell.
Why Lucy? Why not the whole room?
Because that’s how it works with the best kind of storytelling elder. They don’t perform for an audience. They wait for the right listener: someone curious enough to ask the right question, patient enough to sit still for the answer, and trusted enough to be handed something precious. I wanted Lucy’s relationship with Gramps to feel like that: private, warm, a little bit sacred.
I think there’s something children are quietly hungry for that we don’t talk about enough, a grown-up who treats them like they’re capable of holding something important. So much of childhood involves being told what you’re too young for. A Gramps figure does the opposite. He looks at a twelve-year-old and decides she’s exactly old enough for this.
That kind of trust changes a child. It certainly changes Lucy. By the end of the book, she isn’t just entertained by her great-grandfather’s story, she’s transformed by it. She sees him differently. She sees herself differently. She understands, perhaps for the first time, that the people she loves have entire hidden lifetimes behind their familiar faces, and that she, too, is being handed the responsibility of remembering.
I’ve thought a great deal about the Gramps figures in my own life, people who were generous with their stories, who didn’t wait until I was “old enough” by some arbitrary measure, but simply waited until I was ready to listen. Those relationships shaped how I see storytelling itself: not as performance, but as inheritance. Not as entertainment, but as trust.
For parents and grandparents reading this, my hope is that The Magical Dumligo serves as a gentle nudge. You may not have a hundred-year-old secret about a magical island, but I promise you have stories your children and grandchildren have never heard, moments of fear, moments of bravery, moments that shaped who you became. You don’t need a purple mist to make them magical. You only need to tell them.
And for young readers, I hope this book makes you look a little more closely at the older people in your life, a grandparent, a great-uncle, a family friend who’s always been “just around.” Ask them a question you’ve never thought to ask. You might discover your own Gramps has been waiting, quietly, for exactly that.
Every child needs a Gramps. If you’re lucky, you already have one. If you’re luckier still, you’ll realize it in time to ask the right question.
I wrote this book, in part, as a thank-you to all the Gramps figures who came before me, the ones who trusted me with their stories long before I understood how rare that trust really was. I hope every reader, young or old, finds a little bit of their own Gramps somewhere in these pages.