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Chris Colfer's The Land of Stories - An Author's Odyssey is a fairy-tale adventure for 9 year olds where Conner's old homework might be the only thing that can save the day.
It opens at a retirement party. Mrs Peters, the twins' old sixth-grade teacher, pops back into her classroom to say goodbye. Then Alex and Conner appear out of a whirlwind looking for a stack of Conner's handwritten short stories.
She's got them in her handbag!
It's a really warm start. Mrs Peters knows more about the fairy-tale world than the twins ever guessed. She also tells Conner he's the closest thing to a favourite student she's ever had (Alex is NOT expecting that).
Then the book swings hard the other way. The fairy-tale world has been taken over. The Masked Man calls himself emperor now, with the Wicked Witch of the West, the Queen of Hearts and Captain Hook standing beside him. Villages have been burnt and the kings and queens are marched up onto a platform to be executed.
What happens next is brilliant fun. The executioner is the Tin Woodman in disguise, the platform's a trapdoor, and Peter Pan, Robin Hood and the Lost Boys all pile into the escape. The Lost Boys turn it into a game with their slingshots (ten points for the card soldiers, five for the gold ones).
Meanwhile Conner has a plan. He'll use a potion to go inside his own stories, find the heroes he made up and bring them back to help. Alex isn't so sure. He admits he's "taken some liberties" with them. What could possibly go wrong?
It's worth knowing that the execution scene is tense. The Masked Man threatens to kill the whole crowd and orders the men, then the women, then the children. The axe swings a few times before the trick is revealed and children in the crowd are crying. Nobody gets hurt, but a sensitive reader might want a grown-up close by for that bit. A reader who's followed the twins this far will probably cheer.
This is the fifth book in the series and it leans hard on everything before it. If your reader hasn't met the twins yet, start them at the beginning with The Wishing Spell.
If they like seeing what fairy-tale families get up to after the famous bits, The Storybook of Legends is a good one to try. Raven is the Evil Queen's daughter at a school for fairy-tale children, and her mum talks to her from a mirror prison.
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