Author: Ellen Potter
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Qin Leng.
This is volume one in a series of short, but nicely-paced stories for seven to nine year olds. The chapters are few and short, and there are cute illustrations by Qin Leng which are simple but very effective. The main character is Piper Green, a young firecracker of a girl who is very much a go-getter and highly self-motivated.
Piper lives on a tiny island named Peek-a-Boo, which is off the coast of Maine on the North Atlantic seaboard of the US. The island is so small that there's no school and a handful of kids, pretty much all sons and daughters of lobster trappers, have to travel by lobster boat to nearby Mink island where they attend school.
Piper is fine with this, but her problem is that her favorite brother Eric has left the island to attend boarding school elsewhere, and she misses him something chronic. She has a pair of his old ear muffs and she refuses to take them off, even when she sleeps. This inevitably causes a clash with her new teacher at school.
Piper is a feisty and stubborn girl who can't avoid problems of her own making. This series looks at Piper's problems and how she addresses them, and how she then goes on to fix the mistakes she made when she first 'dealt' with the problem. This one focuses on her struggle with the new teacher who even Piper thinks looks like a fairy princess.
It also brings into play the fairy tree - a large tree in Piper's yard. One day, having run away from the boat that morning, refusing to go to school, Piper is hiding out in the branches and she hears weird noises which appear to be coming from within the tree itself. Her neighbor hears them too, and promptly gets a saw and cuts of the branch on which Piper had previously been sitting.
In place of the branch now, there's a hole and a hollow inside the tree. Piper's neighbor assures Piper that it's a fairy exchange hole, and if Piper leaves something in there, she will get something of value back. Piper likes this idea and immediate starts an exchange program!
This novel is completely charming. It's realistic, well-written, interesting, funny, and endearing. Piper comes out of the pages as a real person and she very much captures and holds the attention. I recommend this even if you're not seven to nine! Read it between seven and nine in the evening and no one will be able to say a thing about it!
