My Little Troublemaker

PreS-K—In this very pink book, a young girl is a good student at Fairy School, but she has issues with one of her classmates, who is often mean to her. One day, after an encounter with the bully, the pink fairy fantasizes about throwing soup on her, and a tiny fairy who looks just like her materializes in a bubble above her head. She makes the soup spill happen, and the protagonist gets into trouble, as no one believes that she didn't do it. Several more incidents happen when the tiny fairy appears to carry out the not-so-nice deeds that are imagined. That, of course, gets the narrator in trouble repeatedly. This is frustrating because she doesn't know what is happening. Finally the child confesses the existence of the miniature fairy to the Fairy Principal, who explains that everyone has such a troublemaker and that they have to learn how to deal with them. From then on, the nameless narrator goes back to being a well-behaved student who only occasionally uses her troublemaker to turn her nemesis into a lizard, frog, or bat for a short time. The cartoon illustrations show the main character as a very small girl with a large head. There is a big lesson here but the Fairy School setting and solution don't translate well to real life.—Ieva Bates, Ann Arbor District Library, MI