Read Whatever After 10 – Sugar and Spice free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
The tenth Whatever After book, Sugar and Spice by Sarah Mlynowski, is a fairy tale adventure for 8 year olds that begins with no pudding and soon finds a house made of cake.
Abby is having the worst night ever. She got a note home from her teacher, so she can't go to her friend Frankie's. She wouldn't eat her spinach, so there's no dessert. (It was only fruitcake, but still.)
Then her little brother Jonah smashes a lamp playing duckball in the living room. No screens either.
Mum and Dad never said anything about magic mirrors, though. So at midnight Abby marches Jonah and their dog Prince down to the basement, and they knock three times.
She lands face down in a spinach patch. Of course she does.
The fields here are all vegetables, fenced off with very rude signs and guarded by an enormous angry bird. In the forest beyond, Abby and Jonah walk smack into a girl and a boy who look EXACTLY like them.
The girl is Gretel. The boy is Hansel.
Then Jonah starts moaning about tidying his room and being made to eat his greens. Hansel and Gretel have never had a bedroom. They've never been to school. They'd love a vegetable.
Abby goes red. She can hear how spoiled the two of them sound (and nobody has to tell her).
Hansel and Gretel aren't angels, mind. Gretel is every bit as bossy as Abby (Abby notices), and Hansel throws a stone at the dog.
Abby and Jonah always end up changing the stories they visit. Now Jonah wonders whether the fairy in the mirror would like them to stop. So should they lead two hungry children to a witch's cake house and let the tale run?
They do, and it goes wrong. Before long it's Abby and Jonah the witch is planning to cook.
Abby tells Jonah the whole old story early on. A father and stepmother leave their children in the forest, twice, because food is short. A witch cages a boy to fatten him up for a pie, and she ends up in her own oven.
It's told quickly and Jonah mostly shouts that it's gross. A child who worries about being left behind might not find it funny, though. One who already knows the tale will enjoy spotting what's coming.
Duckball, by the way, comes from the trip before this one. That's Genie in a Bottle, which drops Abby and Jonah into Aladdin's story. Abby turns up worn out from a school read-a-thon, and there's a magician who keeps granola bars up his sleeve.
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