The Magic Paintbrush and Other Enchanted Tales

The Magic Paintbrush and Other Enchanted Tales by Henry Lien, Jennifer Torres and Varsha Bajaj is a book of three magical stories for 8 year olds, each one an old folktale moved into a modern school.

What happens

The first story belongs to Malia. She was born in China and adopted by her two mums as a baby. Then a confident new girl arrives in class from China, and suddenly Malia wonders whether she's "really Chinese" at all.

Her Chinese teacher, Mrs Tong, lends her a plain old paintbrush with one rule. Never use it for selfish things. It turns out that whatever you paint with it comes to life, which is how Malia ends up with an eight-foot ostrich in her bedroom (she's allergic to birds, of course).

What she does next is lovely. She paints a proper winter outfit for a girl whose coat is too thin, and hot lunch passes for the kids who need them. And when things go badly wrong in the park, she has to work out how to fix them without being able to rub anything out.

The second story, Butterfly Girl, is gentler. Vanesa has promised to look after Lucia, a new girl who's come to town for the cherry-picking season. Butterflies follow Lucia everywhere and the school garden seems to wave at her. But when Vanesa lets her down where Lucia can hear, the rain starts and won't stop.

The third story, by Varsha Bajaj, has an enchanted statue and a lot of baseball. The book tells you at the start that the three tales come from China, Mexico and India.

Malia and Vanesa each tell their own story, so it feels like a friend telling you what happened. They're funny too. Malia tells you about that ostrich sneeze in tiny one-line bursts, each one sillier than the last.

The magic is the fun part, but the heart of both those stories is working out where you belong. Being new, being different, wanting to fit in and getting it a bit wrong. If your reader has ever been the new one in the class, they'll recognise a lot of this.

The schools are American (sixth grade is about the same as Year 7 here), so there's the odd word like "recess" to explain. And as there are three separate stories, it's an easy one to read a tale at a time.

What to read next

If Malia's paintbrush is the favourite, Jennifer Torres also wrote Catalina Incognito. Catalina's great-aunt gives her a battered old sewing kit that holds real magic, with the same sort of warning to save it for when she truly needs it.