Whatever After 1 – Fairest of All

Sarah Mlynowski's Fairest of All is the first Whatever After book, a funny fairy tale adventure for 8 year olds about a brother and sister who fall through a mirror and wreck Snow White's story by accident.

What happens

Abby is ten and she's NOT happy. Her family has just moved to Smithville, where they play tag by the wrong rules and mash the banana into the peanut butter. (She lays all this out like a court case. She's going to be a judge one day.)

Then her little brother Jonah wakes her just before midnight to say the mirror in the basement is hissing.

He knocks on it three times and it turns purple. It swallows his trainers, her slippers and a swivel chair. Then it swallows them.

They land in a forest and follow a grumpy old lady to a cottage, where she's trying very hard to give a girl an apple. Jonah is starving, so he runs out and asks for it himself.

You can probably see where this is going. Abby can't (not for ages), and Jonah waggling his eyebrows at her while the girl says her name is Snow is very funny.

So Snow never takes a bite. Hooray! Except the apple is how the old story gets her to her prince, and now fixing that falls to a ten-year-old in lime-green pyjamas.

Abby tells it all herself, very fast. She makes plans with numbered steps and lists her brother's crimes as Exhibits A to E. Jonah mostly wants to know if anyone in this fairy tale has Cheetos.

She's homesick underneath it all. She misses her old friends and her nana, who read her these stories in the first place. If your reader has had to start again somewhere new, they'll probably feel that.

It's worth knowing that Abby was raised on the original fairy tale as well as the film, and she tells Snow all of it over dinner. A huntsman was sent to kill her. He took the queen an animal's lungs and liver instead, and Jonah is delighted to remember that she ate them.

Snow's mother and father have both died, too, and the queen is properly menacing when her disguise slips. It's told lightly, but a sensitive reader might want you nearby.

What to read next

Each book drops the pair into a different tale (Cinderella is next). For a much later trip, try Seeing Red. Nana comes to stay, Abby storms off through the mirror in a sulk and lands in a huntsman's treehouse, with a girl in a red hood singing on the path below.