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Seven months among mermaids and devils and sprites
My niece dropped a handful of maple keys into a small pool of tea-colored water dappled brightly with leaves in a hollow of the grass and said something about fairy skates. I have since learned that she has been building fairy houses out of twigs etc. with the nearer set of twins. Her personal mythos appears to be expanding.
Does anyone have recommendations for fairy books or media that might appeal to an almost eight-year-old who likes dragons, unicorns, selkies, and mermaids but does not just sit down and read her way through the complete bibliography of Katharine Briggs? My immediate instinct was to show her FairyTale: A True Story (1997), because I was reminded of a scene in it, but she may be slightly too young for it yet. She already has my copy of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Seasons (1988), but otherwise I got such fairies as I had in childhood almost entirely from books of folklore and Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), the first American edition with the Rackham illustrations inherited from my great-grandparents; my mother reminds me that I also read her childhood copy of Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) because I missed all of the racism and satire and went straight for Mother Carey. We have things like Jane Yolen and Charles Mikolaycak's Tam Lin (1990) and Eric Quayle and Michael Foreman's The Little People's Pageant of Cornish Legends (1986) lying around the house and she probably would enjoy Alan Lee and Brian Froud's Faeries (1978) if I could get my copy out of storage. She has the tolerance for eerie images of a child who grew up annually watching The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), but I can't always tell what she will find narratively scary.
I have done little with fairy themes in my own work: a couple of recurring motifs. It would not have been shocking for changelings to be important to me, but I fastened onto other kinds of nonhumanness instead.
Does anyone have recommendations for fairy books or media that might appeal to an almost eight-year-old who likes dragons, unicorns, selkies, and mermaids but does not just sit down and read her way through the complete bibliography of Katharine Briggs? My immediate instinct was to show her FairyTale: A True Story (1997), because I was reminded of a scene in it, but she may be slightly too young for it yet. She already has my copy of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Seasons (1988), but otherwise I got such fairies as I had in childhood almost entirely from books of folklore and Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), the first American edition with the Rackham illustrations inherited from my great-grandparents; my mother reminds me that I also read her childhood copy of Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) because I missed all of the racism and satire and went straight for Mother Carey. We have things like Jane Yolen and Charles Mikolaycak's Tam Lin (1990) and Eric Quayle and Michael Foreman's The Little People's Pageant of Cornish Legends (1986) lying around the house and she probably would enjoy Alan Lee and Brian Froud's Faeries (1978) if I could get my copy out of storage. She has the tolerance for eerie images of a child who grew up annually watching The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), but I can't always tell what she will find narratively scary.
I have done little with fairy themes in my own work: a couple of recurring motifs. It would not have been shocking for changelings to be important to me, but I fastened onto other kinds of nonhumanness instead.
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I'll take them now! If she turns out not to be interested, I might be.
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Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Not a kids' book (though I'd have loved it as a kid), about homunculi made of various materials and heist.
A number of Ruth Chew's books have shrinking sequences. They're lovely and perfect for her age group, though they're magic object/talking cat/friendly witches rather than fairies.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IQROB1I/ THREE SHIRINKING TALES.
I also especially like What the Witch Left, The Witch's Garden (they shrink in that one), Witch in the House, and The Wednesday Witch. Skip the ones about time travel, but all the others I've read are good.
The Twelve and the Genii; combines living dolls with, unexpectedly, the Brontes.
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I had forgotten the existence of Ruth Chew as well as The Twelve and the Genii (though I don't know how, it's a memorable premise) and am not familiar with the others you name, so thank you! Is the sequel to The Little Grey Men the original-book-destroying kind or just not very good?
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Note "genre: tiny people" tag.
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I've even read at least one of them, but the traumatizing one is the one I remember!
Speaking of Rumer Godden and small-size stories, did you see when the NYRB reprinted The Mousewife (1951) and Mouse House (1952)? I remember the second more vividly, but the first sounds like it would reward re-reading as an adult.
And now that I'm thinking about mice, have you read Peter Dickinson's Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera (1993)? It was one of his formative books for me; I re-read it earlier this year and it still holds up.
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I have not read the Dickinson book.
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Yay!
I have not read the Dickinson book.
It is not from mouse-perspective, but it has very good telepathic mice.
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Not necessarily: as noted somewhere else in this conversation, I'm not sure she has any familiarity with Potter's works beyond the special couple of bowls illustrated with scenes from Peter Rabbit that belonged to me and my brother as children. (I can't remember if my bowl or my brother's is her favorite. I used to eat hot cereal and nothing else out of mine.) That reminds me to check on the whereabouts of my copy of Graham Oakley's The Church Mice Adrift (1976), though.