I know I promised to review “Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg” about a month ago, but it’s taken me that long to get my hands on a copy. Now I have, so I can bring the first story of Tinker Bell’s solo adventures in Neverland to you.
Actually, “Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg,” the first of the children’s books Disney commissioned to kick off its Tinker Bell/Pixie line even before the home-release movies, doesn’t star Tinker Bell. Our main protagonist is newly-born Never Fairy Prilla; Tinker Bell is the most important of the secondary characters, receiving her own mostly-independent plot line, but she still carries a supporting role.
“Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg,” tells the story of Prilla, a new arrival to Neverland. As those familiar with Peter Pan lore know, fairies are born of an infant’s first laugh, but not all laughs get to be Never fairies; that’s an honor reserved for the most rare and talented sort of fairies.
For each Neverland fairy has a special talent, be it for flying, taking care of the vital fairy dust, or, as Tinker Bell’s own name implies, fixing things. The first thing a Never fairy does upon her arrival is announce her talent, thus determining her place within Fairy Haven.
Only Prilla doesn’t know her talent. Neither does Prilla seem born with all of her fairy intuition. She knows how to fly and that she’s a Never fairy, certainly, but she’s without the instinctual knowledge of many fairy customs; no, there’s something decidedly Clumsy (a fairy’s name for a human) about her.
But Prilla doesn’t have much time to ponder her plight. For the first time ever, a hurricane descends upon Neverland. It injuries Mother Dove, mother to all fairies and from whose feathers fairy dust is wrung, and more terribly, it destroys Mother Dove’s egg, the source of Neverland’s magic.
Prilla must put aside her own worries to help her fellow fairies restore a rapidly aging Neverland; all in the space of a day Captain Hook finds a gray hair in his beard and Peter Pan’s baby teeth begin to fall out.
“Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg” author Gail Carson Levine, adored by me for her “Ella Enchanted,” comes out swinging with her first Disney Pixie book. I don’t know that I’d have the guts to put Neverland, part of a beloved Western property, into such peril my first time out. But Levine does so with ease, employing her practiced fairy-tale style that fits right in with Neverland’s whimsy.
But what of Tinker Bell? My main interest in Disney’s Pixie novels was to determine whether the company successfully transitions the playful-but-sometimes-nasty Tinker Bell I remember from both J.M. Barrie’s original work and Disney’s own “Peter Pan” movie into the sensible heroine I witnessed in the recent Disney Pixie animated films.
Levine gracefully eases that transition. As the book’s narrator itself says, Tinker Bell, upon discovering Prilla won’t join her ranks as a fixing talent, gives the fairy an unintentional but blithe dismissal, neither being particularly mean nor particularly nice to Prilla. It’s that immaturity showing through even as we see a more dependable, sometimes sweet side of Tink, which convinces me of her character growth.
It’s not just Tinker Bell, though. All the fairies, for all their good intentions (or at least, not harmful ones, save for the devious Vidia who’s as much of a villain as we get in this tame of a children’s tale) are rather flighty. This is only to be expected from such slight winged creatures, helping to solidify Levine’s Neverland as one which can legitimately carry the story forward.
Sometimes the book did become a bit cloying for me, especially during its frequent cutbacks to the fairies’ despair at Mother Dove’s fading health. But Levine does an excellent job of bridging the gap between Peter Pan and the pixies that were before just ancillary characters in his story. Disney was definitely right to hire such a talented author to kick start their fairy franchise.
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