The Fairy Rebel by Lynne Reid Banks is a fairy story for 7 year olds about breaking the one rule that fairies are never allowed to break.<\/p>\n
It’s told by a storyteller who talks straight to your reader. If you go to a school just outside London, she says, you might end up sitting next to a girl called Bindi, and you’d think she was perfectly ordinary. She isn’t, and here’s why.<\/p>\n
First you have to hear about Bindi’s mum. Jan was an actress, and a good one, until a heavy lamp fell on her in a television studio. She came out of hospital with a bad limp and stopped acting, because she couldn’t stand people feeling sorry for her.<\/p>\n
She married Charlie, who is a doctor. They bought a little house with fruit trees. And then they waited and waited for a baby who never came.<\/p>\n
Banks doesn’t tiptoe around any of that. Jan cries at night when she thinks Charlie is asleep. Charlie has to coax her to sing. Even the garden goes droopy.<\/p>\n
So Jan is sitting under the pear tree in tears when something lands on her bare toe. A fairy, who is now stuck there.<\/p>\n
This is the part that makes the book. Fairies are invisible and weightless, but the moment one touches a person she turns solid and visible and can’t fly off until that person believes in her. The fairy is cross about it, because she was only playing follow-my-zoomer and her friend Wijic knew she’d touch.<\/p>\n
She has pink hair, stumpy furry wings like a moth’s, and a tiny pair of blue jeans, which fairies are absolutely not supposed to wear. The Queen hates them.<\/p>\n
She also tries one of Jan’s tears, spits it out, and has to suck nectar out of a nasturtium to get rid of the taste.<\/p>\n
It’s very funny and very warm, and it’s obvious where it’s heading. Jan wants a daughter. Fairies are forbidden to use magic on humans. You can feel the Queen’s anger coming long before it arrives.<\/p>\n
One thing to square away first. It’s an older book and it shows in the way it talks about bodies. Bindi is described as nicely chubby and teased about it, Jan’s weight gain after her injury gets several sentences, and the fairy blames being too fat for landing on a toe. None of it is meant unkindly and none of it is the point of the story, but if your reader is sensitive about that sort of comment, read the first chapter with them.<\/p>\n
If they take to a small character with a lot of opinions, Banks wrote another one who lives in a tunnel, speaks a language with no vowels in it and ends up far too close to humans for comfort. That one is Harry the Poisonous Centipede’s Big Adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Fairy Rebel by Lynne Reid Banks is a fairy story for 7 year olds about breaking the one rule that fairies are never allowed to break. It’s told by a storyteller who talks straight to your reader. If you go to a school just outside London, she says, you might end up sitting next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11156,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7609,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Harry the Poisonous Centipede's Big Adventure","lr_seo_hook":"A fairy lands on a crying woman's toe and gets stuck there."},"book_tag":[1047],"age_group":[19],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[653],"class_list":["post-9027","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-magic-books","age_group-books-for-7-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-lynne-reid-banks"],"yoast_title":"The Fairy Rebel by Lynne Reid Banks | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A fairy lands on a crying woman's toe and gets stuck there. For ages 7+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n