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Julia Donaldson's Princess Mirror-Belle and Prince Precious Paws is three funny stories for 7 year olds about a girl whose bossy double keeps climbing out of mirrors.
Ellen is an ordinary girl with an ordinary dog called Splodge. Mirror-Belle looks exactly like her. The difference is that Mirror-Belle says she's a princess (and tells anyone who'll listen).
In the first story she comes up out of a lake, dripping wet, with a dog of her own. Prince Precious Paws looks just like Splodge. He behaves nothing like him. In no time at all he's chewed a toddler's ball to bits, run off with a nature club's roast chicken and cornered a field of sheep.
Mirror-Belle is never embarrassed by any of it. She has an answer for everything, and it's usually borrowed from a fairy tale. The dog once belonged to a tailor who was given three dogs with eyes as big as saucers, apparently. He's a bit deaf, which is why he growls when she calls him. Who could argue with that?
Ellen is the one left feeling awful, and that's a lot of the fun. She's polite and sensible and forever trying to smooth things over while her double makes everything worse. Anyone with a bossy friend or sibling will probably recognise the feeling!
The other two stories head to Halloween and to Mum's bedroom. Ellen's friend is ill, so Mirror-Belle turns up dressed as a witch to go guising with her. A hunt for sweets ends with two men in balaclavas and a locked shed. Then three Mirror-Belles climb out of Mum's dressing-table mirrors, each one insisting she's the real princess. Ellen's clever test gets the dusting done before Mum comes home from hospital.
It isn't the first book about the two girls, and Ellen already knows most of Mirror-Belle's tricks. Each story is complete on its own though, so it works nicely as one a night.
If your reader wants to see how it all began, the very first Princess Mirror-Belle book has Ellen off school with chicken pox when her reflection climbs out of the mirror over the basin and starts running her a bath.
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