Whatever After 7 – Beauty Queen

Beauty Queen by Sarah Mlynowski is a fairy tale adventure for 8 year olds about a brother who can't remember any of the adventures.

What happens

Abby and Jonah have a magic mirror in their basement. Knock three times at midnight and it hisses, glows purple and pulls you into a fairy tale.

They've done it six times. Jonah remembers none of it, because the fairy who lives in the mirror hypnotised him by accident, and Abby has been hauling him downstairs every night since, hoping something will jog it loose. She's fed him apples. She's had him wear his football boots round the house. Nothing.

Before they get anywhere near a castle, though, there's an art lesson.

Abby's painting of roses for her mum's birthday has come out as red blobs. Penny's, on the same table, is genuinely lovely, and Abby's two best friends spend the rest of the lesson telling Penny so.

Then Abby knocks a glass of water over Penny's painting.

On purpose. And lies about it within about four seconds.

It's unusual for a book at this age to let its narrator do something that mean in chapter two and then leave her sitting in it. Abby knows exactly what she's done. She dreams that a giant rose is hitting her over the head and calling her a green-eyed monster, and she agrees with the rose.

That's what she carries through the mirror and into Beauty and the Beast, where Jonah picks a rose from the wrong garden and a seven-foot creature in a purple bow tie starts roaring about payment.

Mr Beast, as he insists on being called, is funny and alarming in roughly equal measure. He's scratching the dog behind the ears one minute and shouting about lives the next.

Worth a word on that if your reader takes shouting to heart. The threat is loud and it's aimed at a child, and Abby also stops to retell the original tale, in which the beast means it and the Little Mermaid dies at the end.

There's a lovely small thread running underneath about Jonah being behind with his reading at school, handled without any fuss at all.

What to read next

If the jealousy is the part that lands, Abby in Oz takes Abby into The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with all three of those friends, Penny very much included.