The Fairy Godmother Academy – Birdie’s Book

Jan Bozarth's Birdie's Book is a modern magic story for 9 year olds about a girl sent to stay with a grandmother she has never met, who turns out to have a job for her.

What happens

Sarah Cramer Bright, called Birdie, has just been moved from California to New York and is not over it. Her mother has gone to London for work. Her father puts her on a train to New Jersey to stay with the grandmother her mother has not spoken to in years.

Birdie tells you all this herself and then stops to make you promise not to repeat any of it. That is exactly the right note for a nine year old narrator.

She travels with one old family suitcase her mother told her not to bring and a daisy called Belle in a cracked pot.

The grandmother is worth the journey. Mo is very tall, wears a cowboy hat with a peacock feather, drives a yellow car with fins, burns the grilled cheese and has a Victorian greenhouse full of orange trees at the bottom of the garden.

Birdie names people after plants in her head. Her mother is a calla lily, straight and stiff. Mo is a tiger lily on sight.

The magic arrives slowly and through the garden, which is the nicest thing about the book. A wound in a tree. A word on a dusty violin. A stone in a bird's nest that turns out to be half of something, with half a maze carved on the back, and a tune that Birdie and her grandmother both start humming at the same moment without ever having heard it.

Then Mo tells her why she is really there. To heal the tree, to track down the piece the stone is missing, and to put the family back together.

There is nothing frightening here. What there is, quite a lot of, is a girl missing her old home and her friends and crying about it, and two grown ups who have not spoken for years. A reader going through a move or a family falling out will feel that keenly, which is probably the point.

The plant names and Latin come thick and fast. Some children love that and some will skim it.

What to read next

There is a similar shape to A Most Magical Girl, where a girl is left with two great-aunts in Victorian London and told much the same sort of thing. Fair warning that one opens far darker, with a machine in a ballroom being fed things stolen from graves.