Stargirl Academy 1 – Lily’s Shimmering Spell

Vivian French's Stargirl Academy story Lily's Shimmering Spell is a magic school adventure for 7 year olds about a girl whose life is fairly horrible right up until her elbow starts tingling.

What happens

Lily lives with Great-aunt Acidity. She carries the tea, she gets shouted at, and the parrot has learned to call her a stupid girl because that is what it hears all day long.

Then she spills a cup, and while she is waiting to be told off, a cloud shaped like a castle floats past the window.

Next time she steps outside, the road is full of thick white fog. There are steps where no steps were. There is an open door.

Inside is the Fairy Mary McBee Academy for Stargirls, which used to train fairy godmothers and is now trying something new, because nobody answered the advertisement. Six girls in a team, a spell every lesson, and a necklace that makes you invisible when you tap it.

(Two of the girls make it very clear they consider the rest beneath them.)

It's told by Lily, which is why it works. You get her polite out loud and furious underneath. You get the moment she is handed a silver chain and has to admit she has never been given anything pretty in her life. And you get proper comedy alongside it, mostly from Miss Scritch's disapproving sniffs and Fairy Fifibelle Lee calling everyone her little petals.

The magic is small and practical too. No pumpkins into coaches. Mostly a little change here and a little tweak there, as Miss Scritch puts it, which makes the first good deed feel like something a child could genuinely imagine doing.

Great-aunt Acidity needs a word of warning, though. She is unkind rather than comically unkind. She grabs Lily's wrist hard enough to really hurt, she raises her stick, she calls her a worm and a slug, and she doesn't feed her properly. It's the engine of the whole story and it's why the Academy matters so much when Lily finds it, but a soft-hearted reader will feel those first few pages.

The good news is that the Academy is warm from the moment she walks in, and it stays that way.

What to read next

If she wants the next mission straight afterwards, Madison's Starry Spell has the wand choosing a different girl, and a friend of Madison's sister who says her mother is very ill.