Fairy Spell: How Two Girls Convinced the World That Fairies Are Real by Marc Tyler Nobleman (review)

Readers fascinated by hoaxes may be familiar with the “Cottingley fairies,” captured on film during and after World War I by cousins Elsie and Frances, splashed across the media by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and revealed to have been a trick (gentle revenge against scolding parents) by the perpetrators decades later. This subject has been gracefully handled for older children by Mary Losure in The Fairy Ring (BCCB 4/12), but here Nobleman takes on a somewhat trickier task—to convey the fascinating story of a great kid prank to an audience young enough to retain belief in fairies and not appreciate a buzzkill. In somewhat dense (for a picture book) but fluid text, he lays out the story as contemporaries would have learned it, offering photograph reproductions into evidence among Wheeler’s fluid watercolor paintings and conveying the excitement of the luminaries who believed the girls’ pictures. He then allows the tale to take its own natural turn; as time passes, the photographs are reinterpreted, a copy of the book from which Elsie copied her fairy drawings is discovered, and the grown ladies ’fess up. A forthcoming author’s note should dispatch any lingering doubt, but children determined to keep the faith can still grasp at the parting lines: “Shortly before [Frances] died, she gave her last word on the matter: ‘There were fairies at Cottingley.’”