A Friend in Need: The Very Fairy Princess A Spooky Sparkly Halloween by Julie Andrews and Emma Hamilton

BOO! You might not recognize me, because I'm wearing a costume... but I'm still a fairy princess underneath.

You can take the princess out of her sparkles, but you can't take the sparkles out of a princess.

But Gerry has a problem with her costume for the school Halloween parade. Her brother wisecracks that she should go as a drama queen! Her dad annoyingly jokes that she can just wear her daily attire, fairy wings and crown. Gerry protests:

"That's not a costume! That's what I AM!"

How to find a costume that allows her to keep her crown and wings? But real fairy princesses rise above adversity, and Gerry has a stroke of brilliance. She adds a draped white sheet and a halo, and voila'--she's an angel!

At school everyone is dressed for the occasion, and her best friend Delilah shows her her dentist's costume, pointing out that that is what she's going to be when she grows up. But at lunch, class clown Connor gets a bit wild with the ketchup for his hot dog and squirts the red stuff all over Delilah's impeccable white medical coat. Delilah is distraught.

"I can't wear this in the parade! It sends TOTALLY the wrong message about dentists!"

But a friend in need is a friend indeed. Gerry takes off her sheet, and tying it around Delilah's shoulders in two big knots, turns her into a giant tooth.

"But what about your costume?" asks the loyal Delilah.

Gerry gets to work with construction paper, glue, and glitter, and presto! Suddenly she's the Tooth Fairy, the perfect parade partner for Delilah, and the two take the trophy for the Most Creative Teamwork.

Fairy princesses make sacrifices for friends in need, and Julie Andrews and daughter Emma Walton Hamilton concoct another convincing plot for their persistently effervescent and best-selling heroine in The Very Fairy Princess: A Spooky, Sparkly Halloween (Little Brown Kids, 2016), all dressed up for the holiday in an appropriately glittery new paperback edition with stickers, in a story that celebrates the Halloween holiday with the bonus of a perky plug for thinking outside the box. Their illustrious illustrator, Christine Davenier, provides the sparkle in her charming watercolor and pencil artwork of a very fairy princess at work in the world, in a holiday story that young readers will relish (without Connor's ketchup!)