Popular culture | Cotsen Children’s Library

Time to welcome the Tooth Fairy into the 21^st century, where more is more! The brand needs to create more memories to store up besides comparing with siblings, friends, and frenemies how much the tooth fairy was good for, or whispering when someone younger is present that there was a big hand attached to dad’s arm under the pillow…

Try the video game “Tooth Fairy Run” on the website of the Royal Mint. For the more bloody-minded there’s a little 2022 horror film “Drill to Kill” starring a psycho tooth fairy. Naturally there are plenty of deviant reimaginings of the tooth fairy on the web. But enough of this—a quick detour into the merch before looking at some intriguing books for children about her (he-fairies or gender-neutral ones for another time).

Calm anxiety about keeping the tooth safe until it can be collected with the advance purchase (or creation) of a dear little container, a pouch, box, or pillow. Sterling and silver- plate ones are also available, but they look too knobbly to go under even the best cushioned head. Suppose you aren’t a particularly quick and adroit liar when confronted with awkward questions like “What does the tooth fairy do with all the teeth?” (My family’s ready answer was, “She strings them into a necklace miles and miles long and wears it flying around the world at night.”) There is a large selection of picture books which expand upon the scanty stock of tooth fairy folklore by offering multiple backstories about her early life, descriptions of her workspace and workflows, family structure, and superpowers.

The more traditional reimaginings of the airy spirit preserve the pre-industrial business model. In Peter Collington’s wordless The Tooth Fairy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), once she knows where she is wanted, she hurries to an extensive excavation below a tree to mine, melt, and cast ore into a token. She flies to the sleeping expectant’s room, removes the tooth from the box under the pillow (one to fold can be found at the end of the book), and leaves the newly minted token in its place. As soon as she returns home, she repurposes the tooth for a replacement piano key and once it’s been tuned, she happily practices for the rest of the night.

No obstacles crop up during the smooth and timely fulfilment of baby tooth removal and compensation. All the fairy’s energy is focused on one child per night, which seems unlikely, given the number of children across the globe who must lose teeth every day. In a realer world, every night she would have to rush to inconveniently far-flung destinations (although nowhere as many as Santa), routed by a team of experienced traffic controllers. The operation would also need additional staff to manufacture the tokens, manage the inventory, pack, and address the nightly shipment.

The Underhills: A Tooth Fairy Story (Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2019) by Australian author/illustrator Bob Graham substitutes a modern middle-class fairy family tied into the spirit network for the gauzy girl sole proprietor. In this sequel to April and Esme, Tooth Fairies, Mom and Dad drop the three kids off at their grandparents for a sleep-over at their tea pot cottage close to the airport.

Gran has just made the fairy cakes and syrup for breakfast, when a call comes in for an emergency pickup in arrivals. Gran and the girls fly to the terminal to meet Akuba’s flight from Ghana and wait with the angels and cupids until the announcement comes over the loudspeaker. In the rush to get to the airport on time, Gran forgot the coin and tells the girls to find some loose change in a vending machine. The errand is completed seconds before Akuba and her family walk by. April and Esme find the pocket and dive deep inside it to nab the tooth and replace it with the coin. Akuba senses their presence, which obliges the fairies to whisper in her ear that she never heard them moments before the family gets in the cab. Mission accomplished: Akuba won’t have the foggiestidea how the coin got in her sweater pocket.

Graham’s realm of the tooth fairy is so nicely integrated into our world that wings and jumpers look as right as an airport concourse watched over by angels and cupids. The funny, slightly incongruous story in which a little Black girl who lost a baby tooth on an international flight is not overlooked is reassuring without being obvious.

The blurbs on the dust jacket of Toothiana: Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies, volume 3 of William Joyce’s series The Guardians of Childhood, calls it “sweeping and epic, a Persian carpet of story lines” and “deep, dark, dazzling…the most wonderful of William Joyce’s worlds.” It is nothing if not eclectic.

A suggestion by Joyce’s daughter Katharine, who died tragically young of brain cancer, inspired the cast of characters assembled from the great brands of modern childhood fakelore. Headed up by the benign wizard Osmic, the forces for good are Santa Claus (aka Nicholas St. North the Cossack), the Easter Bunny (E. Aster Bunnymund, prodigious digger, chocolatier extraordinaire, and bare chested warrior with six arms), the Tooth Fairy (Toothiana, the keeper of childhood memories) and Nighlight (a Peter Pan clone). Their collective soul is Katharine, a girl on the verge of womanhood, who loses her last baby tooth, “The Tooth of Destiny.” If a new Golden Age is to be created, they must again rout the arch baddie Pitch Black, king of nightmares, and his henchman the Monkey King backed by a force of beserker flying simians, lifted from The Wizard of Oz.

Where does the Tooth Fairy fit into the pseudo-oriental epic straining to keep Katharine safe without utterly defeating Pitch, so the sequels can keep coming. An orphan who is a sword-wielding hummingbird in harem pants with the power to split herself into six tiny avatars (the vaunted army). Her name does not inspire terror and awe, but neither would alternatives like Molarella, Bicuspidina, Canina, or Enamelette. She has to compete for space in her own volume with the other Guardians—and more critically, Katharine–so backstory gets swallowed up by all the other storylines churning the thirty short chapters written in short choppy sentences. Like Rise of the Guardians, the DreamWorks Animation fantasy-action-adventure franchise that foundered after the first animated film, Toothiana is stuffed so full with underdeveloped ideas that the narrative and characters never come alive to the extent necessary to sustain a series of installments.

It’s no wonder the Tooth Fairy has issues with mission, identity, and agency…

When it comes to ranking the individual volumes of Harry Potter from best to worst, everybody’s a critic. The longest of the seven books, Order of the Phoenix tends to fall at the top or the bottom of people’s lists. The first 156 pages (in two columns) takes Harry from Privet Drive to Grimmauld Place, the Ministry for the disciplinary hearing, back on the Hogwarts Express, and finally the Great Hall, where the Sorting Hat warns of imminent danger while Dolores Umbridge smirks at high table. Her brief reign of terror is more riveting than panicked students cramming for the O.W.L.S.–or the Tri-Wizard Tournament in the previous volume. After the magnificent chaos of the Weasley twins’ exit, the pace accelerates exponentially in the remaining one hundred pages with the standoff in the Department of Mysteries, the death of Sirius, and Dumbledore’s rout of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The falling action slows to a crawl while the head master rehearses all the exposition which will propel the plot over the last two books punctuated by the crashes of delicate instruments Harry throws against the walls. Order of the Phoenix this time around was more of a slog than I remembered. Rowling’s challenge, similar to Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week (1982), was to integrate adolescent angst, test anxiety, and magic in a school story while building up the anxiety of the pending outbreak of the Second Wizarding War. Crosscutting between academics and the gathering storm isn’t always smooth, when so much more rides on friends’ standoff against the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries than their O.W.L.S., whose results won’t be revealed until the beginning of The Half-Blood Prince. Piling on Harry’s halting, wooden conversations with Cho Chang and Hagrid’s taming of half-brother Grawpy dragged down the story, at least in my opinion. I also wished Rowling’s editor had pointed out that Harry doesn’t need to bellow in all caps because context makes is clear that he was upset, mad, frustrated, etc.

Kay’s strategy in the preceding four volumes played to his gifts–carefully observed drawings of fabulous beasts, architecture, and individual characters. Several lovely drawings are devoted to owls, which sharply contrast with the spread of the common doxy, all legs, sharp teeth and claws, sprayed without mercy by Mrs. Weasley and her gang of exterminators. Thestrals appear twice with Harry—a haunting one of him looking up at one and the much more frightening picture of him clinging to his skeletal mount as it wheels over the London skyline.

Grimmauld Place is a perfect subject for an artist with Kay’s flair for the dark and uncanny. Open the book and the row houses’ facades, which have seen better days, appear on the front endpapers; flip to the back and number 12 has emerged black and looming between numbers 11 and 13. Mrs. Weasley climbs the filthy, decaying stairway to the upper floors on an errand. In another Sirius and Harry clean out the grim cabinet of sinister curiosities in what was once a grand room.New characters came to life in more portraits. Tonks is disarming in her robes over torn jeans. Dolores Umbridge presides over the tea table set with a garish pink service, stubby fingers grasping a knife dripping blood-red jam. Her mustard floral patterned robes are accessorized with a necklace of beads that look like staring eyes. The two little smears of lipstick on her teeth is a great touch. In the less grotesque portrait of Luna Lovegood, the bulging misty blue eyes nearly overshadow the signature necklace of butterbeer corks. With her wand behind her ear, she is odd but not unlikeable although difficult to size up. One of Kay’s favorites, Hagrid is the subject of several rather unpleasant illustrations, painted in muddy colors with coarse brush strokes. In this volume, Snape’s appearance is more ghoulish than human, a change that the text does not really call for, unless it is supposed to be Harry’s projection of the potions master The strain on Kay of doing justice to scenes revolving around individual heroism and those celebrating fellowship manifests itself most clearly in the absence of illustrations for dramatic confrontations between characters before witnesses–Umbridge’s attempt to throw out Sybil Trelawney, Ron letting through goals during the Quidditch match, Dumbledore defying Fudge in his office. The double-page illustration of the members of Dumbledore’s Army summoning up their patronuses doesn’t quiver with energy, except for the drawing of Fred (or is it George?) in the lower left. As in the other four volumes, sections of colored pages signal the heightening of tension: during the course of the episode in the Department of Mysteries, backgrounds change from black, greenish-black, purple, pale bluish-green, and back to black. What Kay draws on those pages instead of falling bodies crashing into ranges of shelving, Hermione marking the exit door, or the blasting of the statues in the Ministry’s atrium, is a series of frightening faces from below. They are the stuff of nightmares, but the small eerie line drawing of Ginny was much more effective because the expression on her face communicated fear, wonder, and horror when confronted by the glass bell.Order of the Phoenix doesn’t feel incompletely realized—not because the illustrator’s heart wasn’t in it, but perhaps the story put too many daunting demands on him, even with Neil Packer, a long-time illustrator for the Folio Society providing many accomplished decorations and vignettes. I was not entirely surprised by Kay’s announcement when it was published in October 2023 that he was stepping away from the project to focus on his mental health (the dedication mentioned his doctors at the NHS, which suggests he must have been struggling for some time). At the beginning of this huge endeavor, I wondered how Kay could meet the grueling publication schedule (originally one volume a year) without collapsing or sacrificing quality. He must have felt as if he were being eaten alive by the project and that it would be impossible to illustrate the last two volumes without an extended sabbatical to recharge his imagination. He deserves nothing but good wishes from his fans for a well-deserved rest and for all his future endeavors. Bloomsbury has promised to find a successor to complete the illustrated Harry Potter, but no one has been named yet, as far as I’ve been able to discover.