The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy by Elizabeth George Page B

Injun Joe!), a battle with pirates (Peter Pan and Captain Hook!), and our Janet was actually able to transport herself into the scene itself. And not as a passive observer, mind you, but rather as a full participant in the story. Thus the Mad Hatter and the March Hare served her tea along with Alice, and when the Prince presented the glass slipper to Cinderella, Janet was able to shove her aside and try the footwear on herself. That other Prince kissed her instead of Snow White and who can blame him since kissing Snow was so akin to smooching a corpse, and when Rapunzel lowered her hair, Janet climbed down to her rescuer before he could get a decent grip on the locks that would lead him to his love.
    Can there be any doubt, then, why Janet Shore greeted her illnesses with the passion of a long lost love come to claim her hand? How could doubt exist in this situation? And it was all so easy to achieve in a household where one went largely unnoticed. Indeed, the very fact of Janet’s near anonymity among her siblings allowed her hours and days in which to practice launching herself into novels when she was engaged in a battle with no illness at all. She learned that this required of her only three elements: a story that provided her with enchantment, excitement, terror, thrills, or any other physical or emotional connection to it; solitude to serve as a launching pad; and a tether that allowed her access back into the real world.
    Two of these were easily come by. Becoming lost within and enthralled by a story was second nature to Janet, and using the family dog as a tether did not require a great deal of thought. Solitude was the tricky bit, but she finally managed to locate the perfect spot for this when she discovered that, tucked deep within the village’s old and crumbling cemetery and just beyond the looming conifers that lined the far side of the area dedicated to the cremated citizens of Langley, an ancient potting shed had been long forgotten and nearly consumed by blackberry bushes, lichen, and moss. In this shed, carefully repaired as best she could to keep out the rain which was plentiful in this part of the world, Janet supplied herself with an ancient hook rug long ago made by one of her aunts, along with what surely was a third hand blanket purchased from the local thrift store, and a pillow pilfered from the hall closet in her parents’ house, only disinterred when a relative came to visit and had to sleep on the couch. Supplied with these items of marginal comfort, Janet could retire to the cemetery and to her hidden spot as often as she liked, in the company of whatever rescue dog her family was currently sheltering. With the dog outside of the potting shed and Janet inside with his leash wrapped round her wrist, she was safely anchored to the real world, the dog dragging her back to it the moment his dinner hour rolled around. It was a foolproof way to experience life in the written world, and thus it served her several years.
    Janet would no doubt have rested quietly with her talent had not a very silly argument about a Halloween pageant, Boo Radley, and Bob Ewell developed between her and her best friend Monie Reardon. A misreading of the climactic scene in that novel and its subsequent denouement had given Monie the impression that, just as Heck Tate slyly suggested, Bob Ewell had fallen upon his own knife. Nothing that Janet said to Monie could convince the girl of anything else. Even their seventh grade teacher Mrs. Neff could not convince Monie. For Monie was something of a black-and-white reader, and the subtleties of Heck Tate’s suggestions and his references to the townspeople leaving grateful gifts on the Radley doorstep did not convince Monie that she was sadly mistaken about Bob Ewell’s demise in the climax of the book. Thus, Janet decided to provide her with an experience to alter her viewpoint.
    Janet wasn’t certain that she could do this, however: to send someone other