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Chris Colfer's The Land of Stories - The Wishing Spell is a fairy-tale adventure for 9 year olds about twins who couldn't be more different.
Alex Bailey is the girl in the front row with her hand up. She knows exactly what Rumpelstiltskin was after, and why it matters. Her twin brother Conner is the boy asleep at the back (snoring, and drooling a little).
Alex is lonely, though. The other girls laugh at her behind her back and she spends lunch under a tree with a library book. Conner has plenty of friends but keeps getting told he should be more like his sister.
The walk home from school is the best bit of the opening. Alex wants to talk about what Sleeping Beauty really means. Conner reckons the lesson of Goldilocks is to lock your doors. Alex is trying VERY hard not to laugh.
Underneath the jokes, home is sad. Their dad died a year ago, just before their eleventh birthday. He owned a bookshop and used to read them fairy tales by the fire at Grandma's cottage. Now Mum works double shifts at the hospital and the twins hardly see her.
Then comes their twelfth birthday, and an old storybook that carries them out of their world and into the one from all those bedtime stories. There are trolls and wolves and goblins and witches in there. Getting home again is the hard part.
It's told from both sides, so you get Alex's worrying one minute and Conner's wisecracks the next. Who hasn't had a sibling who drives them mad and is secretly quite funny? Alex even does something she's never done before to help her brother out (and feels awful about it straight away).
The prologue sets a darker note, with Snow White visiting her stepmother in a prison cell to ask why she did it.
The twins' grief isn't a twist. Their dad's death is told plainly in the second chapter, with the funeral, the house they had to sell and Mum crying to his photo. If your reader has lost a parent, this could land very close to home. Conner also uses one mild swear word in a joke. For a child who can take it, the sadness is what makes the twins so easy to root for.
If this one goes down well, Tilly and the Bookwanderers has another girl who'd rather spend time with book characters than with her classmates. Tilly lives above her grandparents' bookshop, her dad has died and her mum is missing, and people from her favourite stories start turning up in the shop.
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