Stargirl Academy Christmas Special – Melody and Jackson’s Christmas Spell

Melody and Jackson's Christmas Spell by Vivian French is the Stargirl Academy Christmas special, a fairy-godmother story for 7 year olds told by two girls who agree on nothing.

What happens

Jackson starts it off. She and Melody are stuck in a shopping centre while Melody's mum takes an age in every shop, so they watch a queue of children waiting to see Father Christmas in a grotto shaped like a pink furry cuckoo clock. A man dressed as a silver cuckoo pops out and shouts at everybody to hurry up.

Two things happen in that queue.

A little girl in a velvet dress wheedles her mother for a purple singing dog on top of the present she is already getting, and gets a yes.

Then a woman pulls her own two out of the line, because it costs five pounds a child and she is late for work. The girl screams. The boy doesn't argue at all. He just rubs his face with the back of his hand as he goes.

That's when the Tingle arrives in both girls' elbows, which is how the Academy calls them in, and Melody marches them straight through the cuckoo clock and into a magic school built on a cloud.

The lesson that day is shrinking. Fairy Fifibelle Lee teaches it while calling everyone her precious petal, Miss Scritch sniffs at her from the sidelines, and the spell refuses to work at first because nobody has written the second list they will need to grow again.

The pleasure of it is the two voices. Chapters swap narrator as they go, so your reader always knows whose head they're in.

Jackson is prickly and quite enjoys being prickly. Melody is certain she's right about everything and is badly wrong about that family in the queue, in a way the story doesn't let her off.

That's the unusual bit, really. Both girls start out a little snobby. They call the children in the grotto spoiled brats, and then they spend the book working out who actually needed the help.

This one sits outside the numbered run, and the girls explain enough as they go that it reads perfectly well on its own.

What to read next

If your reader would rather start where the school does, Lily's Shimmering Spell opens with a girl carrying a cup of tea to a great-aunt who calls her a slug, and the same sharp tingle in her elbow.