Earthstar Magic, by Ruth Chew

[rachelmanija]

A brother and sister encounter a sweet but distinctly incompetent witch and her flying earthstar. I had never heard of an earthstar before reading this book, but the kids are familiar with them.

Unsurprisingly for a Ruth Chew book, shrinking is involved. This book is collected as "Three Shrinking Tales," to go with her other collections "Three Witch Tales" and "Three Wishing Tales," but in fact most of her books contain at least two out of the three if not all three.

The kids bounce back and forth between trusting and distrusting Trudy the witch and it takes them forever to figure out the secret of the earthstar, so they were not my favorites. But there's lots of great shrinking bits like the shrunken kids getting covered in juice eating part of a raspberry, and the regular-sized kids cutting up a raisin with scissors to add to cornflakes served to the shrunken witch in a bowl made of the cap off a bottle of lemon juice. Also a pair of absolutely amazing illustrations of a shrunken boy getting fed to a baby bird.

An Amazon reviewer writes: Had this book when I was a kid. It ignited my love of mushrooms, reading and witchcraft.



Original cover:

Comments

[skygiants]

I remember very little about the book specifically but the cover is burned in my mind (it was one of the books we had in my second-grade classroom -- I was the only person who ever read most of them, so I was offered a bunch of them at the end of the year by my teacher.)

[rachelmanija]

Awww, that's lovely.