What a fantastic idea for a book! Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a library and check out Snow White’s stepmother’s magic mirror or the Pied Piper’s pipes? Elizabeth has no idea what she’s getting herself into when she accepts a job at the New-York Circulating Material Repository, but she can really use something good in her life. In the opening scene of the book, Elizabeth gives her gym shoes to a homeless woman outside of her school. Now, I don’t know about you, but this is sort of a fairy tale, and it seems to me that good things happen to people in fairy tales who give away their belongings to help someone less fortunate. So when the homeless woman gives her what looks like an ordinary number 2 pencil, I was kind of wondering if there would be more to it than that. Soon after starting work at her new job, Elizabeth starts to hear about a special collection called the Grimm Collection, but no one seems to want to talk about it. And no wonder. It turns out that everything isn’t on the up and up in the Grimm Collection (which you’ve probably guessed contains magical objects from the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales), and some of Elizabeth’s new friends are part of the problem. Eventually Elizabeth finds herself in the middle of a complicated situation involving objects that aren’t as magical as they’re supposed to be, and some that have just plain disappeared. When her coworker Anjali is kidnapped, it’s up to Elizabeth and the other pages to find her and set her free from a magic spell. There are trips on a magic carpet, tea parties with magically refilling dishes, attacks by a giant menacing bird, and rescues by an equally giant dog. Review by Stacy Church
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