Stargirl Academy 5 – Emma’s Glittering Spell

Vivian French's Emma's Glittering Spell is the fifth Stargirl Academy book, a gentle magic story for 7 year olds narrated by a girl who cannot stop talking.

What happens

Emma is picking up windfall apples in the garden when she gets an ENORMOUS Tingle in her elbow. That's the signal. She runs indoors and comes out in the corridor of Stargirl Academy instead of the back room with the washing machine.

The Academy floats on a cloud and used to train Fairy Godmothers. Now it trains Stargirls. Each girl has a secret star on her little finger for casting spells, and a necklace that turns her invisible to ordinary people, and a pendant with six stars on it. You earn a star by doing a good deed. Emma has four.

She adores all of it, and she tells you so, at length, in capitals, in the friendliest voice you'll meet all week.

Today there's a visitor. Professor Moth is small and round with bristly eyebrows, and he eats an entire tea table's worth of cake before teaching anyone anything. He's come to show the girls a Forgetting Spell.

Then Melody and Jackson, the two who keep themselves apart and think they're rather better than everybody else, use a spell on Emma to make fun of a teacher through her. Emma is on her feet clapping and calling out with every bit of her trying to stop.

They're sent out of the room. And here's the thing about Emma. She's the one who asks whether they should be let back in.

That's really what the book is doing. It looks like cake and sparkles, and underneath it keeps asking what you owe the person who was horrible to you. Your reader gets to decide before Emma does.

The chatty first-person voice is the pleasure. Emma tells you secrets, checks you're keeping up, and apologises for going on a bit. It reads like a friend at the school gate who has a LOT to get through.

What to read next

If they want to know how all this began, start them on Lily's Shimmering Spell. Lily lives with a horrible great-aunt, spills the tea, gets a tingle in her elbow and sees a cloud shaped like a castle going past the window.