One Wish

Michelle Harrison's One Wish is a fairy story with teeth for 11 year olds, about a girl who can see the fairies nobody else believes in.

What happens

Tanya is twelve and she's been able to see them all her life. They're nothing like the fairies in books. They tangle her hair with enchanted hairbrushes, change her homework answers and once turned her face bright blue for picking bluebells. The tooth fairy has never left her a penny, only a toffee somebody had already spat out (stuck to her cheek, no less).

Now she's on a seaside holiday with her mum and Oberon, her greedy Doberman. Her dad left a few months ago and Tanya is cross with everyone. Within minutes of arriving, something under the cottage floorboards is threatening to stamp out her eyes while she sleeps.

Then she finds the Wishing Tree. It stands alone in a meadow, hung with hundreds of coloured bottles, and it talks. One wish, it says, and it reels off all the rules in rhyme. Tanya knows exactly what she'd ask for. And up in the branches there's a scruffy boy, which means someone else can hear the tree too.

He's Ratty, a bit of a pickpocket, and he comes with his own fairy. Turpin has one tattered wing, big hairy toes and a sack full of stolen things. She's rude and she's a thief, and it's hard not to love her.

It's such a treat to be inside Tanya's head. She's prickly and lonely and stubborn (she will NOT be bullied by a fairy under the floor), and she's desperate for someone who understands. Finding Ratty feels huge. Her sadness about her parents sits right alongside the funny bits, just like it would for a real twelve-year-old.

A short word about the opening. The prologue is properly creepy. A man with pointed ears smashes hourglass after hourglass in a clock shop and swears he'll bring someone called Helena back. Something in the shadows calls him Master, and its face is too terrible to look at. It's the kind of shiver most readers at the top of this shelf will enjoy, but a nervous one may want the light on.

If you've got a reader who loves magic that's a bit dangerous, this is perfect.

What to read next

If they want more of Tanya, try The Thirteen Treasures next. She's a little older and the fairies are even nastier (one night they leave her standing on the ceiling). This time the story takes her to her grandmother's manor, the house full of fairies she dreads in this book.