Ibby’s Magic Weekend written by Heather Dyer, illustrated by Peter Bailey
Chicken House/Scholastic, $16.99, 142pp, hc, 9780545032094. Children’s fantasy.
Ibby’s parents are off to a conference for the weekend, leaving Ibby with her aunt and two boy cousins. She isn’t terribly happy with the arrangement, but doesn’t realize just how exciting her weekend is going to be. Cousins Alex and Francis have found a magic kit in the attic, but this isn’t just sleight-of-hand magic, as Ibby discovers when she helps Alex find the now-two-inch-tall Francis running around his bedroom.
As with all such mysteries, our three young protagonists instinctively know that Aunt Carole (Alex and Francis’s mother) must be kept from knowing what’s going on. That’s a recurring theme in most books and television programs—that whatever is happening has to be kept a secret—and I’m not sure why, but it provides some of the conflict in the book, as the three cousins experiment with (and try to recover from) the magic kit while not letting on to Aunt Carole what is happening.
Levitation, invisibility, aging and de-aging, and the mysterious disappearance of Uncle Godfrey five years ago will make for a weekened that Ibby won’t soon forget. But when they discover what happened to Godfrey, and realize that he’s been waiting for them to recover him, it looks like the adventures are just getting started. Well, that, and the ad for the advanced kit they find as the book ends.
This is a fun book for 7- to 11-year-olds (probably the younger end of that range), fun and not scary, and the line drawings definitely add to the charm.