How to Ditch Your Fairy
by Justine Larbalestier

Imagine a world where most people have their own personal fairy--a fairy that performs a single random task all the time .  That world is New Avalon, where Charlie has a parking fairy and everyone knows it.  Anytime Charlie is in the car, the driver can automatically find the perfect parking place, no matter where they are going or what time of day it is.  Charlie hates her fairy, hates driving and cars, and hates smelling like gasoline.  More than anything she wants a cool fairy like her friend's shopping fairy, or like Fiorenze's boy fairy, which makes every boy her age adore her.  To get rid of her stupid parking fairy, Charlie has been walking everywhere for two months, without success.  Her determination not to ride in a car has caused her to be late to her sports school where there are so many rules and ways to get demerits, that she is constantly in trouble.  In desperation, Charlie agrees to meet with Fiorenze's mother, the world's greatest expert on fairies, in an effort to get rid of her fairy.  But things are going too slowly, so Charlie and Fiorenze agree to sneak a look at the ultimate fairy book written by Fiorenze's mother, and learn how to switch fairies.  Charlie could hardly wait to to have every boy in school drooling over her, but when it happens, she soon realizes that constant adulation is not all it's cracked up to be.  Fio and Charlie go to extreme lengths to ditch their fairies altogether in a hilarious, if far-fetched, comedy of errors.  This book is filled with Aussie slang, which is a little hard to get used to at first, but the glossary at the end of the book helps.  How to Ditch Your Fairy is a fun read from the 2010-2011 Tayshas list.
             --reviewed by Mrs. Sams

The New Policeman

by Kate Thompson

      J.J. and his family live on a farm outside the small Irish village of Kinvara.  Musicians all, the four family members struggle to keep up with everything in their lives.  There's never enough time to do it all--chores, school work, house work, fiddle-playing and dancing. It almost seems like the days get shorter and shorter all the time.  J.J.'s mom Helen has a birthday coming up.  All she wants is more time.  J.J. doesn't know how he's going to do it, but he's determined to get more time for his mom.  A chance meeting with a neighbor lady sends J.J. exploring the underground rooms of an ancient fort ruins, and there Anne Korff shows him the passageway into another world, the world of the faeries, where time is supposed to stand still.  Together they hope to discover where the time leak from one world to the other is, and plug up the hole.  The problem with traveling between the two worlds is that it's hard to remember why you've come once you cross over.  J.J. struggles to stay focused on his purpose of finding the time leak.  Meanwhile, the new policeman in Kinvara is really a faerie who entered from the faerie world to search for the leak from this side.  Only he just can't remember why he became a policeman.  Interwoven with ancient Irish legends and the traditional dance music of generations ago, this quiet and magical tale charms and seduces the reader and draws him back to a time in history when fairies and leprechans were as real as a next door neighbor.  A lovely story.

         ~reviewed by Mrs. Sams

Book of a Thousand Days

by Shannon Hale

This beautifully written, lyrical novel is based on a lesser-known Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Though the plot is engaging, and the characters appealing, it's the language that drew me through the story. Book of a Thousand Days reads more like poetry or a song, than like prose. It has more striking similes than I can remember encountering in a novel before. Phrases like "his soul slipped back inside, curled up like a cat in his chest, and purred to be home," and "I was under the stars like a fish is under water," and "in a few months' time winter would whack us dead like a yak's tail slaps a fly," run all through the text. Since Dashti, a peasant girl and the main character of the story, has learned to sing all the healing songs from her mother, the lilting quality of the language perfectly complements the events of the plot. And healing is one of the main themes--healing of body and soul. This is a story full of cruelty, privation, and destruction, yet Dashti's songs keep the tone light and hopeful. The structure of this book is in Dashti's diary entries as she and her mistress Saren are bricked up in a tower by Saren's father for seven years, without light or fresh air, because she wouldn't agree to marry the man her father had chosen for her. After half that time, they manage to break themselves out, only to find that the lady's home city has been utterly destroyed by the man she was to marry. They travel on to the city of Khan Tegus, the ruler of a neighboring kingdom, and the man Saren wants to marry. There they find work in the palace kitchen, and Dashti waits for an opportunity to make Saren's presence known to Tegus. Though Dashti is allowed to sing her songs of healing to the khan, Saren is too afraid to reveal herself, and Dashti falls in love with Tegus herself. In the end, both Saren and Dashti gain happiness through separate acts of bravery. And everyone lived happily ever after. --reviewed by Dail Sams