Dory foils evil in her best triumph so far

Dory Fantasmagory series: Head in the Clouds by Abby Hanlon

Many series for fledgling readers feature mischievous girls and their school exploits: Ramona Quimby, Junie B Jones and Clementine, to name a few. Others, like the Magic Treehouse books, send children on fantasy adventures.

Abby Hanlon’s marvellous Dory Fantasmagory series featuring plucky heroine Dory, also known as Rascal, combines the two. As Dory puts it: “My two worlds swirl together like a chocolate and vanilla ice cream cone. Real and unreal get mixed up in one crazy flavour.”

On every page, Hanlon’s charming illustrations – if you squint, they resemble a child’s drawings – mix things up, interweaving visual and narrative storytelling to invite us in to Dory’s imagination.

The fourth and latest book, Dory Fantasmagory: Head in the Clouds, will have fans rejoicing that Hanlon’s hybrid formula is still going strong. Dory faces obstacles mundane and enchanted and surmounts them all. She dumps an objectionable winter coat and devises a pretend game to captivate a weepy friend. After losing her first tooth, she recognises the Tooth Fairy, shopping incognito, and chases her through a store. And in perhaps her greatest triumph so far, she foils the evil plan of her imaginary nemesis, Mrs Gobble Gracker, to take over that benevolent spirit’s nightly visits.

Throughout the series,

Dory deals with conventional problems – scornful older siblings, starting school, making friends, learning to read – in unconventional ways.

While many stories for children send their protagonists back to the real world for good – Wendy grows up and can’t return to Neverland, Lucy leaves Narnia, Jackie Paper abandons Puff the Magic Dragon – Hanlon does not champion maturity as the answer to adversity. A former Grade 1 teacher, she recognises the value of coping strategies particular to children.

Rascal becomes resilient, resourceful and adventurous thanks to the permeable boundary between reality and fantasy, not in spite of it.

“Try not to imagine things,” Dory’s sister, Violet, tells her when she heads off to pre-school. But it is Rascal’s imagination that allows her to adapt to new surroundings, practise new skills and make new friends.

In Head in the Clouds,

Hanlon again shows an unerring sense of what distresses children (that “bunchy” winter coat), what excites them (candy canes discovered in pockets), and what they fear (a tooth fairy delivery gone astray). There is much to laugh over. We see Luke’s and Violet’s frustrated memories of life with infant Dory. We learn the contents of the Tooth Fairy’s purse (like Beyoncé, she carries a certain condiment). And we get Mrs Gobble Gracker’s withering assessment of Where the Wild Things Are: “I’ll show them terrible teeth.” When Dory loses her first tooth, her doleful friend Melody sobs, “It means you are growing up!”

The admiring reader earnestly hopes not yet. – The New York Times