Jenny has finally accepted her life of magic and mayhem as savior of fairy tale kingdoms, but that doesn't mean the job's any easier. Her new mission is to travel to the Land of Tales to defeat an evil witch and complete three Impossible Tasks. Throw in some school friends, a bumbling knight, a rhyming troll, and a giant bird, and happily ever after starts looking far far away. But with her parents' fate on the line, this is one happy ending Jenny is determined to deliver. Gr 4-7-As this sequel to My Very Unfairy Tale Life (Sourcebooks, 2011) opens, Jenny is in the midst of a mermaid battle, trying to convince the warring parties to compromise while dodging the putrid fish they are hurling at each other. This trope of showing mythical creatures to be less lovely and well-mannered than readers expect recurs throughout the novel as Jenny, in her official capacity as an adventurer, visits magical lands to complete assignments handed down from a mysterious committee via a friendly, junk-food-crazy gnome. Although Jenny faces many perils (a troll, a sea monster, a witch, etc.), she usually laughs them off, and readers may have trouble caring about her trials and tribulations when the stakes don't feel that high. Jenny's parents were adventurers, too, and their disappearance seven years earlier is tangled up with their daughter's current quest. This plot device should add emotional weight to the story, but due to the lack of character development, it doesn't. The protagonist is a pleasant enough narrator, but she and her friends are not fully realized enough to evoke much interest. Most readers will want to stick with standbys like Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted (HarperCollins, 1998) or Adam Gidwitz's A Tale Dark and Grim (Dutton, 2010) for their dose of fractured fairy tales.-Gesse Stark-Smith, Multnomah County Library, Portland, ORα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. "Staniszewski again keeps her tone light and frothy with plenty of wry humor...Flippant fantasy fun."- Kirkus Anna Staniszewski lives outside of Boston with her husband and an adorably crazy dog. She was named the Boston Public Library's 2006-2007 Writer-in-Residence and a winner of the 2009 PEN New England Discovery Award. When she's not writing, Anna spends her time teaching, reading, and jumping rope with mermaids. Visit her at annastan.com. Chapter One If someone tells you that you're being sent to a magical mermaid land, take my advice and spend the day at the aquarium instead. Then you can have a nice lunch, feed some dolphins, and not get caught in the middle of a merpeople war. Mermaids are nothing like the gorgeous girls you see in movies. In reality, they're bitter creatures who hate the water because it turns their skin pruney. Even though their tails don't transform into legs, that doesn't stop them from desperately wanting to live on land so they can spend their days basking in the sun. Which is why the Green Tails and the Blue Tails were ?ghting over an island the size of a school bus. And why I, Jenny the Adventurer, had been sent to stop them. To be honest, I wasn't doing a very good job so far. If I'd been on this mission alone, things probably would have been ?ne. But my bosses―the all-powerful and all-annoying Committee―didn't trust me after I'd threatened to quit being an adventurer, so they'd found me a baby-sitter: Jasmine, the wimpiest girl in the universe. "Jenny," she said as the two of us huddled behind a sand dune. The mermaid armies were lined up on the beach, on opposite sides of the tiny island, balanced on their tails like trained seals. "I think our current position is overly exposed. Maybe we should relocate?" We were right in between the two merpeople clans, but since the island only had three sand dunes and one puny palm tree, there was nowhere else for us to go. "Relocate to where?" I made sure to keep my nose covered with my T-shirt as I spoke. Fun fact about mermaids: they smell like a bucket of old ?sh. Before Jasmine could answer, a shout rang out among the Blue Tails: "Load the catapult!" A second later, a bunch of sea sponges shot through the air. Jasmine shrieked and covered her head. "I think this situation is getting too dangerous! We should call for our guides." I stared at her. Jasmine was only a couple years older than me, but she acted like a little old lady. Was she really afraid of some flying sponges? "Jasmine, we only just got here. And we can't abandon an assignment." "Spray!" one of the Green Tails yelled. A shower of star?sh sailed over our heads. "There's no shame in walking away from an adventure and trying again another day," said Jasmine. "Better safe than sorry." We adventurers sure love our cheesy sayings. I guess I couldn't blame Jasmine for being so cautious. Thanks to Klarr, the evil clown sorcerer, she'd spent days as a bear statue. Even now, weeks after I'd managed to defeat the crazy clown, Jasm