Grace the Glitter Fairy

Daisy Meadows' Grace the Glitter Fairy is a fizzy fairy adventure for 5 year olds, set at a little boy's birthday party where the decorations keep going wrong.

What happens

Rachel and Kirsty are making daisy chains in the garden when there's an "OW!" from behind the fence. Is it a goblin? No, it's only Mr Cooper next door, hiding presents for a treasure hunt.

His son Jamie is turning five and it's party day. So the girls offer to help. Jamie is SO excited he can hardly stand still (and he's very sweet).

Then the trouble starts. The new streamers fall apart in little pieces. They go up and come down again. The balloons have holes in them. Then the ones they blow up go POP, POP, POP!

You can guess who's behind it. A goblin is after another Party Fairy's bag of magic dust for Jack Frost, and he's making a mess so that a fairy will come and fix it.

Grace arrives in a flash of pink sparkles at exactly the wrong moment, just as a gang of small children charges into the garden for the treasure hunt. Kirsty has to hide her in a pocket. She tells a little girl the glittery thing is just a sweet wrapper for the bin. (Grace is not impressed!)

There's a goblin-shaped lump behind the curtains, a sneaky trap with the party bag as bait, and a hiding place behind the armchair that's only big enough once the girls are fairy-sized. The ending is very silly. Let's just say the goblin ends up looking like a mummy.

It's a sweet, busy, giggly read. Most of the fun is in the small disasters, and a younger reader will know exactly how Jamie feels when his streamers drop off in bits. Kirsty fixes them with sparkly tape left over from Christmas, which is a lovely bit of real-life making do.

There's nothing scary in it at all. The goblin is sneaky rather than frightening, and the clown, Mr Chuckles, is a proper treat by the end.

This is the third Party Fairies book. It opens by catching up on the first two, so your reader can pick it up here. If you'd like the whole week in order, though, it starts with Cherry the Cake Fairy.

The library copy is the American edition, so there's a "yard" and a "trash can". It doesn't get in the way.

What to read next

And if your reader is new to Rachel and Kirsty altogether, try Ruby the Red Fairy. It's where the two girls first meet, on a ferry to Rainspell Island in sunshine and rain.