The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell Read Online Free

deciding on which story to write about. The pictures weren’t as colorful and exciting as they had been in her grandmother’s book, but seeing all the characters she had grown up reading about made her feel at home, a feeling that had recently become a rarity.
    If only fairy tales were real,
she thought.
Somebody could wave a wand and magically make things how they used to be.



THE LONGER WALK HOME
    I ’m so excited about this lesson,” Alex told Conner as they walked home from school. This was something Conner was used to hearing his sister declare, and it was usually his cue to stop listening.
    “Mrs. Peters made a very good point, you know,” Alex continued excitedly, speaking a mile a minute. “Think about everything children miss out on when they’re deprived of fairy tales! Oh, how terrible for them! Don’t you just feel awful for them? Conner, are you listening to me?”
    “Yup,” Conner lied. His attention was focused on an abandoned snail shell he was kicking along the sidewalk.
    “Can you imagine a childhood without knowing all those characters and places?” Alex continued. “We’re so fortunate that Dad and Grandma made such a point of reading them to us when we were little.”
    “Very lucky…” Conner nodded, although he wasn’t exactly sure what he was agreeing with.
    Every day after school, the Bailey twins would walk home together. They lived in a charming neighborhood that was surrounded by more charming neighborhoods that were surrounded by another series of charming neighborhoods. It was a sea of suburbia, where each house was similar to the next but uniquely different at the same time.
    To pass the time as they walked, Alex would tell her brother everything on her mind: all her current thoughts and concerns, a summary of everything she had learned that day, and what she planned to do as soon as they got home. As much as this daily routine annoyed Conner, he knew he was the only person in the world Alex had to talk to, so he tried his best to listen. But listening had never been Conner’s forte.
    “How am I ever going to decide which story to write about? It’s too difficult to choose!” Alex said, clapping her hands with excitement. “Which one are you going to write your paper on?”
    “Um…” Conner said, whipping his head up fromlooking at the ground. He had to mentally rewind the conversation to remember what the question was.
    “ ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ ” he said, choosing the first fairy tale that came to mind.
    “You can’t choose that one,” Alex said, shaking her head. “That’s the most obvious one! You have to select something more challenging to impress Mrs. Peters. You should pick something with a message hidden deeper inside it, one that isn’t so on-the-surface.”
    Conner sighed. It was always easier to just go along with Alex instead of arguing with her, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
    “Fine, I’ll pick ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” he decided.
    “Interesting selection,” Alex said, intrigued. “What do
you
suppose the moral of that story is?”
    “Don’t piss off your neighbors, I guess,” Conner said.
    Alex grunted disapprovingly.
    “Be serious, Conner! That is
not
the moral of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” she reprimanded.
    “Sure it is,” Conner explained. “If the king and queen had just invited that crazy enchantress to their daughter’s party in the first place, none of that stuff ever would have happened.”
    “They couldn’t have stopped it from happening,” said Alex. “That enchantress was evil and probably would have cursed the baby princess anyway. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is about trying to prevent the unpreventable. Her parents tried protecting her and had all the spinning wheels in the kingdom destroyed. She was so sheltered, she didn’t evenknow what the danger was, and she still pricked her finger on the first spindle she ever saw.”
    Conner thought about this possibility and shook his head. He liked his version much