By Sarah Mlynowski
A brother and sister fall through a magic mirror into Snow White's story and accidentally wreck the whole fairy tale.
Abby and her little brother Jonah have a magic mirror in the basement of their new house, and one night it swallows them and drops them straight into Snow White's fairy tale. They stop Snow White from biting the poisoned apple, which sounds like a good deed, right up until they realize they've knocked the entire story off its rails and now have to fix it, prince and all, before the mirror will send them home.
This is the one I hand a child who loved The Land of Stories but isn't quite ready for its heft yet. Same delicious idea, real children dropped inside the fairy tales, but shorter, breezier, and laugh-out-loud funny. Abby narrates like your child's chattiest best friend, the chapters go fast, and the 'we broke the story, now what' hook keeps the pages turning. Best of all there are more than a dozen more waiting, so if it lands you've just bought yourself a long stretch of easy bedtimes.