Read Whatever After 11 – Two Peas in a Pod free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Sarah Mlynowski's Two Peas in a Pod is the eleventh Whatever After book, a funny twist on The Princess and the Pea for 8 year olds in which a girl who wasn't picked at school gets picked to run a kingdom.
Abby is ten and 99.9 per cent sure she's about to be named student leader of the school carnival. (Think school fair, with candyfloss.) She was first to sign up and handed in ten ideas when they only wanted five.
Then the name is read out. Abby stands up to wave, and it isn't hers. It's Anisa's.
She takes it VERY badly. Anisa hardly says a word, so how's she meant to lead anything? When Anisa comes over and asks for her help, Abby says she's far too busy.
That night her little brother Jonah and their dog Prince jump through the magic mirror in the basement, so she has to follow.
They land somewhere hot and swampy, in pouring rain, with Abby still in her pyjamas. There's an alligator. There's a castle with one light on.
And upstairs there are two beds piled with a hundred mattresses each. Abby knows exactly which story this is.
What she doesn't know is that there's a pea under hers. She lies awake all night anyway, because she's fifty feet up and the ladder has gone.
The kingdom of Bog sees it differently. Their king has died with no heir and every girl in the land has failed the pea test. Abby yawns at breakfast, so Abby is their princess.
She isn't, obviously. But back home she wasn't good enough to run a carnival (her words), and here there's a crown, twenty-five dresses and an ice cream float with three cherries. Would your reader say no?
Abby tells it all herself, fast and chatty, and she's very funny about how sorry she feels for herself. Jonah mostly wants to know whether the pea was frozen (and whether you could eat it with ketchup).
Abby has decided quiet people can't be leaders. The first person she meets in Bog is Belly, a maid so shy that Abby has to lean in to hear her.
If you've got a child who's ever come second and sulked about it for days, they'll probably recognise some of this.
Abby explains the mirror from scratch, so they can start here.
Book ten, Sugar and Spice, is the Hansel and Gretel one. Abby storms through the mirror after an evening with no screens and no pudding, and meets a boy and a girl in a forest who look a lot like her and Jonah.
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