The Night Fairy

aka: Fiction Keeps it Real

Our library does a Mother-Daughter Book club for girls 9 and up. Since it every month fills quickly Bowery Bird had the idea to just do one of our own. We are lucky enough to have a library with book club sets, so I reserved Juvenile sets from the them for 5 months out and invited 10 of our little friends and their mothers to join us.

Our first book was The Night Fairy by Laura Amy Shiltz. It was a great introduction for our young girls, being a sweet fairy's tale filled with the conflict of survival and forgiveness after her wings are bitten off by a bat.

Just before this a good friend recommend the book Deconstructing Penguins by Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone. It was the key needed to make an okay book club incredible. I read it just in time and used its techniques to introduce the book with the idea that we are all book detectives trying to solve the mystery of the book's various parts. While eating grasshopper cookies we took votes to determine who were the protagonist (pushing the story forward) and antagonist (stopping the story from progressing). Then we talked about what the theme of the book was and came up with Flory's fear resulting from the loss of her wings. I noted these things on a white board for everyone to see.

 I see this Mother Daughter Book club as sort of a cross between your basic book-talk and the book The Mother-Daughter Project by Hamkins & Shutlz (which I feel is a must read for any mother of girls). It is the effort of two women in the social sciences to bond mothers and daughters together and give them the skills and confidence to navigate adolescence and beyond. They do this by showing people how to start a Mother-Daughter Project of their own, with activities to do and topics to discuss.

In the end, I asked for personal examples of life's challenges and changes they've had to adapt to. Girls eagerly said things like "moving", "new baby", " flying to Alaska with only my little brother" (from a 7 y/o). Mothers needed more prompting, and two brave moms shared "we can't have any more children" and "we don't have a car that fits our family".

It got very real, and I think helped us all see that being young or old doesn't keep us from challenges, and--like Flory--challenges don't have to keep us from being happy.