Maine's Peek-a-Boo Island, where all the kids ride a lobster boat to school, is the enchanting setting for Piper Green and the Fairy Tree, a warm, witty chapter-book series debut by Ellen Potter (Olivia Kidney series, The Kneebone Boy).
Piper Green insists on wearing her absent older brother Erik's monkey-face earmuffs for the first day of second grade. "Who's going to want to be friends with a kid who wears monkey earmuffs all the time?" asks her younger brother, Leo. "People who love monkeys," Piper retorts. "Which is everyone." So, it's with her parents' reluctant okay and earmuffs stubbornly on that Piper takes the Maddie Rose, a lobster boat, to the 50-kid school on Mink Island. (At the wharf, Mr. Grindle asks, "How's the wife and kids, Leo?" because Leo tells everyone he's married to a piece of paper named Michelle and that their children are three yellow Post-it notes he stuck on Michelle.) Though Piper is a truly hilarious first-person narrator, the story is not all hilarity: Piper's older brother Erik moved out to attend high school on the mainland, and she misses him fiercely. It's not until she encounters the magic of the mysteriously mewing Fairy Tree that she changes her mind and abandons the monkey-face earmuffs once and for all. When Piper goes back to school, her teacher says it's "nice to see your ears," and Piper responds, "Nice to see yours too."
Qin Leng's cheerful, expressive black-and-white pen-and-ink illustrations (and a map!) add even more merriment to this story of community, caring and kittens. --Karin Snelson, children's editor, Shelf Awareness