The Fairy Ring, or Elsie and Frances Fool the World

 Meet the Book: The Fairy Ring: Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World by Mary Losure

Lexile: 940

Summary: In the 1920s, two young girls capture photographs of fairies in their backyard. Folklorists catch word that there is proof fairies exist, and soon Elsie and Frances are caught up in a whirlwind of truth seekers and believers trying to get more evidence of fairy existence. However, Frances and Elsie have a secret: the fairies are just Elsie’s realistic paintings caught on camera! Fairies don’t exist...or do they? The Fairy Ring won Booklist’s Editor’s Choice Best Children’s Nonfiction in 2012, and was a Junior Library Guild Selection book (Mary Losure 2016).

As a kid, my aunt and I watched the movie Fairytale: A True Story that was based on the Cottingley Fairies. We probably rented it hundreds of times, and Blockbuster should’ve just gifted it to me at that point…. Ancient references aside, I was really excited to dive into The Fairy Ring and learn more about Elsie and Frances’ fairies after being a fan of their story for so long.

Elsie and Frances were young cousins that were spending a summer together as Frances’ father was off fighting in the war. They would go off to the creek behind the house and spend time playing in the waterfall, catching frogs, and talking in the sunshine. One day, while Frances was quietly sitting by the water, she saw a little man “about eighteen inches high, dressed all in green, twiddling a willow leaf as he walked along the bank” (Losure pg. 19). A real fairy! Later that evening, when Frances’ mother was scolding her about wasting time at the creek, Frances said she wasn’t wasting time but looking at fairies. 

This was a great example of narrative nonfiction, as there were times I forgot I was reading a true story! I felt like I was reading a classic fairy tale, as Losure’s storytelling was easy to follow and had the perfect mix of facts and fiction(ish). The fiction(ish) parts are the more creative scenes, where Losure describes what the girls are thinking or feeling, or how they react to certain moments that she probably doesn’t know is 100% true but uses a little creative license to make it flow. 

One thing I thought Losure could’ve done better was give explicit dates for when events happened. While the setting and mentions of World War I give an obvious idea that it was set in the early-to-mid 1910s, I would’ve liked to know exact dates as I read. I eventually looked up the dates of when the girls created the photos, and the first photos were taken in 1917 (Historic UK). 

My favorite parts were, of course, the photographs the girls took. As a child, I thought the photos were 100% legit fairies - looking at them now I see obviously they’re not real but can understand how people in the 20s could take them as real. My favorite of the photos was the “Fairy Bower”, and the story behind it. The photo was an “oopsie” that Elsie and Frances took on a gloomy, rainy day when the girls were tired of trying to pretend they were capturing photos of fairies. Elsie said it was just a dark photo of a jumble of grass and weeds, but later on in the book The Coming of the Fairies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, the Doyle that wrote Sherlock who also happened to be a very strong believer in fairies)  claimed it was a “fairy bower” or fairy nest. If you looked closely, you could see a fairy stretching from sleep, with other fairy friends waking from the bower. This is the one photo the girls claim they did not fake, and while one could say that the blurs are shadows or light leaks...but on another look, you can see the outline of wings…

I also loved that Frances and Elsie were adamant that fairies do exist. Frances spoke so nonchalant about the little green men by the brook, and both claimed fairies existed until they passed. The entire reason the hoax was created was to get their families to stop making fun of them because they said fairies existed. If they showed proof, their families would quit poking them about the fairies and leave it alone. However, the exact opposite happened, and I’m still amazed that the fairy photos got this blown out of proportion - to the point that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the girls and their fairies. 

Read-alikes:

School Age: Fairy Spell: How Two Girls Convinced the World that Fairies are Real by Marc Tyler Nobleman

More picture book like, with simpler text and illustrations.

Tween:

English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel

Illustrated by Arthur Rackham, the same artist that Elsie copied her fairies from!

Teen:

Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper

Losure talks about this book and the author, Joe Cooper, towards the end of The Fairy Ring and how (after Elsie and Frances gave him some stern words about leaking their secret) they became good friends for the rest of their lives. Cooper’s book further interviews Elsie and Frances and attempts to find true fairies, in spite of the hoax the girls put on.

References:

Mary Losure. (2016). The Fairy Ring. Retrieved from: https://marylosure.com/books/the-fairy-ring/

Historic UK. (2020.) The Cottingley Fairies. Retrieved for: https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Fairies-of-Cottingley/