Little Legends 6 – The Story Tree

Tom Percival's The Story Tree is a fairy-tale adventure for 5 year olds where Red, Jack and their friends try to stop a war before it starts.

What happens

It's the sixth Little Legends book, so Tale Town is already in a real mess. Mayor Fitch is building an enormous wall (with a golden statue of himself on it, naturally). He's cutting stories he doesn't like off the Story Tree. And the children are outlaws now, living in a hideout in the woods with a gang of very clever, very hungry gorillas.

Then two things go wrong in one night. Wolfie gets grabbed by Fitch's guards on the beach. And their troll friend Quartz calls through a magic mirror to say the whole troll army is marching on the town at dawn.

So the friends split up. One lot goes to rescue Wolfie from the palace dungeons. The other goes to burn down the only bridge from the north, with the help of a noisy ex-huntsman called Wilf and his partially sighted dragon. Who happens to have a sore throat. Cue a tin bath of hot honey and lemon, and a lot of lemons "borrowed" from the woods!

The jokes come thick and fast, and a lot of them will land with grown-ups too. Betsy the hen can only say one word, "What", but everyone always knows exactly what she means. Jack's bag of spells all come from the one cupboard Lily could open (Spells beginning with S), so his "spell of scorching" just sets his own clothes smoking. And poor Cole the Fairy Godbrother tries to make himself faster and turns into a bowl of cold spaghetti instead.

There's real feeling in it too. Jack ends up on his own at one point and has a proper wobble about whether he can do anything at all. And Wolfie's dad, the Big Bad Wolf, turns out to be rather soft about his son. Red is NOT impressed to see him, though (he did eat her grandmother, after all).

It's a longer read than a picture book, so for the youngest readers it's probably one to share at bedtime, a chapter at a time. If your reader loves knowing the old stories, spotting Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and Humpty Dumpty in a new muddle is half the fun.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, go back a few books to The Great Troll Rescue. Anansi's uncle has been cursed to look, sound and smell like a troll, and a very strange message in a bottle washes up on the beach.