The Never Girls
This is not your mom's Tinkerbell
I’m using some fairy dust to fly past the preamble on this edition and go straight to…
The Series: The Never Girls
The Author: Kiki Thorpe
The Illustrator: Jana Christy
Length/Picture density: 130-150, pictures every few pages
I was initially hesitant to read these, because the female Disney characters I grew up watching tended to be helpless, quiet or even mute pretty faces, waiting for Prince Handsome to save them. They’ve been better for a while now (I can confirm this from roughly 74 viewings of Moana), but if you have some of the same reservations, you can ignore those here. These books are great.
The stories center on four human girls, who inadvertently pop into Neverland, and four fairies who they end up on an adventure with. Yes, this is Neverland of the Peter Pan story, but there is no Peter Pan, Captain Hook, lost boys, or any other humans. There are also no swords, crazed bad guys, or any bad guys outside of the occasional trickster fairy.
(This is where I have to tell you that Leo lost steam with these after about five books, so if this series pivots to Sword Battles Against Crazed Bad Guys in the later books, my apologies.)
The stories are plot-driven, but with enough character texture, including some interpersonal conflicts, to give them a richness that more action-focused narratives sometimes lack.
Instead of bad guys, there is a series of perplexing environments, each of which has its own peculiar rules, like a place where you can become disconnected from your shadow, or a beach where lost things resurface.
The magic in these felt internally consistent. It wasn’t overpowering in one instance and suddenly unhelpful in another, based on the needs of the plot, and the dreamy issues the protagonists encounter have a certain logic to them. Either that or the storytelling was good enough that I didn’t notice any big issues.
That said, I understand why Leo lost momentum with these eventually. The settings tend to be gloomy, and the characters go through stretches of being annoyed at each other or feeling left out. There is a good amount of peppiness in the first book as the four girls are discovering that fairies are real, but things get considerably less peppy from there.
The illustrations are pretty and fit the mood, but they don’t pop in a way that adds energy and excitement for young readers.
The books don’t try to be funny, but they trade some amount of lightheartedness you might be expecting from a fairy story for a weightiness that makes the magic in them feel more special and important. The human girls get to experience flight and other enchantments, and you can feel a level of excitement befitting something like that without it getting too precious or grating.
They’re good, but not always fun.
There is one character from the Peter Pan story who plays an important role – Tinkerbell – but this is not the Tinkerbell you remember. In this, she’s an expert tinker (hence the name), as in a fixer and builder of mechanical objects, and she’s not especially enchanting or even friendly. She also goes off on her own early in the story, and the main arc of the first six books is about the four girls and four fairies looking for her.
It’s a nifty use of Tinkerbell’s celebrity: it adds urgency to the search (otherwise we might be wondering why so much energy is going toward finding a side character who was kind of rude to the main characters while she was around), but keeps the focus on the gang of eight.
Like Tinkerbell, each fairy has a special talent, which become useful for various challenges (though from what I remember, they avoid the thing that happens in many super hero ensemble movies where one character is kind of useless until the group encounters a challenge perfectly suited to their ability).
I didn’t go into this expecting to write this strong an endorsement, but these are well-constructed stories, with a good mix of characters, interesting supernatural stuff, and enough moodiness to give them more texture than most stories a kid might consume.
They are a good complement if you’re reading diet is skewing toward male protagonists. There’s a male fairy who plays a minor role in the first book, and that’s about it for male presence in these. From there, it’s all girls, and the characters are generally unique and fairly well realized.
Leo was pretty into them for a while, but they can take some endurance, especially if the surreal parts of the island don’t click in an exciting way for your reader. At 5 and early 6, he might have been a little young for these, but there’s enough story to keep kids going, even if they can’t fully grasp everything that’s happening.