Monday, December 2, 2013

THE FAIRY RING: OR ELSIE AND FRANCES FOOL THE WORLD



Non-Fiction
By Mary Losure
Published by Candlewick Press
Copyright © 2012
Review by Anthony Kendrick

 
I thought that Sherlock was the smartest detective ever, until he (his creator) was fooled by two young girls.

“The Fairy Ring” is the true story of how, in an attempt to get their fathers to stop picking on them, Elsie and Frances made the world think about fairies and made some very prominent people believe in them. Of course getting the world to believe in fairies was not part of the plan, but when Elsie’s mother attended a Theosophist Society meeting and told everyone her daughter had taken pictures of fairies everything began to snowball, until Elsie and Frances just couldn’t tell the truth. Regardless if the pictures were a farce, decades later Elsie and Frances still couldn’t agree on the truth about fairies.

The fairy ring is an intriguing book because it illustrates so deeply how much humans want to believe in the supernatural. We have an innate need to believe that there is more to life that we cannot see; that there are intelligent beings behind the scenes. This book shows this to be the case even with some very brilliant men. I really enjoyed seeing the pictures that the girls took as well. I thought that they showed how good an artist Elsie was, and to me it made the deception more understandable. Setting the farce aside, the images are quite charming.

Whether you believe, or want to believe, in fairies I am sure that you will enjoy this book. And I still think that Sherlock is brilliant!

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