The Imaginary Veterinary 6 – The Fairy Swarm

The Fairy Swarm by Suzanne Selfors is an Imaginary Veterinary story for 7 year olds about a girl who catches a fairy in a saltshaker.

Pearl Petal is having breakfast at the Buttonville Diner with her great-aunt Gladys and Gladys's two sausage dogs, who are strapped into high chairs wearing knitted hats shaped like fried eggs.

A bug keeps buzzing the table. The waitress calls it a hornet. Pearl's old teacher says it's too big for a hornet. Gladys takes a rolled-up newspaper to it and misses.

Then the thing turns round and looks at Pearl. Tiny human body. Tiny human face. Green hair and a little silver crown.

Pearl empties a saltshaker and pops it over her (saltshakers, conveniently, already come with air holes).

She has spent the summer as an apprentice to Dr Woo, who is a vet for imaginary creatures, so she knows exactly what to do with a sick fairy. The snag is that when she gets to the hospital, nobody's there. No Dr Woo, no Mr Tabby, and no dragon on the roof either.

So there's a fairy in a saltshaker on Pearl's chest of drawers, being fed droplets of syrup and orange soda and a bit of honey, tucked up in two squares of loo roll.

The pleasure of it is a completely ordinary small town where the extraordinary keeps turning up and nobody makes a fuss. A school enemy with a library book about dragons. Ben coming out of synagogue with his grandpa, who needs him back later to set up for pudding day at the senior centre. A dragon called Metalmouth sticking his head through the bedroom window to ask if you'd like to play fetch.

Gentle, mostly. The bit that stings is how fast the grown-ups in the diner want the little creature squashed, and Pearl's teacher wants to pin it to a display board. Pearl is horrified, which is the right answer, but a soft-hearted seven-year-old may go quiet for a moment.

This one sits well down the series, and Pearl catches you up generously in the first chapter. If a hospital for creatures that shouldn't exist is the hook, The Unicorn in the Barn does something similar with a perfectly ordinary vet. A boy spots a white shape in the woods behind his house, and it turns out the vet next door has been treating it.