Whatever After 12 – Seeing Red

Seeing Red is the twelfth Whatever After book by Sarah Mlynowski, a fairy tale adventure for 8 year olds that begins with a really good sulk.

What happens

Abby is ten. Her nana has come to stay for the weekend, which is brilliant, right up until Penny rings to invite her to a sleepover with ghost stories, s'mores, a midnight disco and friendship anklets made with beads from France.

Nana says no. Family time.

Abby pleads her case properly, because her parents are lawyers and she's been paying attention. Nana still says no. Then Nana tells her she's being rude, which stings more than the no did.

So at 11.54 that night Abby sets her alarm, creeps down to the basement and knocks three times on the magic mirror. She's asking it, very nicely, to drop her into Penny's sleepover.

The mirror hisses. It turns purple. It swirls.

It does not take her to Penny's.

She lands in a room full of stuffed animal heads, twenty feet up a tree, and her little brother Jonah lands on top of a man in a green vest and knocks him out cold. Then a girl comes singing along the path below in a red hooded cape, and Abby works out exactly whose treehouse they've broken into and exactly whose job they've just ruined.

Abby tells all this herself, at speed, and she talks straight to you. She's funny about her own bad mood without ever quite admitting she was in the wrong. (Jonah, who is seven, has no such problem and says it out loud.)

The books stand on their own, because each trip through the mirror lands in a different fairy tale, so a parent can start here without a lecture on the previous eleven. It helps if your reader knows Little Red Riding Hood, mind, because half the fun is knowing what's supposed to happen and watching it go off the rails.

There's nothing frightening in it. The mounted deer and bear heads get a good long yuck, the huntsman snores through his own concussion, and the tone stays light.

What to read next

For another trip through the same mirror, look up Beauty Queen. That one drops the pair into Beauty and the Beast, where Jonah picks the wrong flowers from the wrong garden and Abby has to sort out a romance that isn't going anywhere.