Llewellyn Worldwide, 0738703907, 144 pp., 2004
The adventures of the Fortune Teller’s Club continue in this fourth installment of the series for middle (junior high school) girls aged 8-12. Anne, Gena, and Juniper once again find their gifts being called into play.
Anne has her plans all set. She is going to Cheer Camp, where she is going to be the first seventh-grader to win Cheerleader of the Year. She can visualize the trophy perfectly. Then a freak accident throws those plans into wild disarray.
Once again the girls step outside the boundaries of traditional divination. They create a new divination tool – a Hand of Fate. This consists of a latex glove, filled with birdseed, and marked with coloured lines, each one of which is labelled. Using it is simple. Ask a question, flip a coin up and onto the hand. Where it lands gives you your answer. Unconventional? Sure, but like most of these creations, this one opens new doorways.
This series isn’t about Pagans, nor is it about magick. It is about youngsters taking control of their lives and not succumbing to peer pressure. It is about young ladies learning to trust their instincts, while still using common sense. The plot lines aren’t deep and mysterious. They are, however, filled with inspiration for young folks. They show it is possible to be “different” yet still live a normal life.
The writing style is crisp, and the stories move along nicely, both within the individual books and within the series as a whole. Each story sees the girls developing a bit more, They are still teenage girls, however. They still have problems with classmates, and crushes on boys. However, these are girls who have an extra component in their lives.
As in the other books in this series (The Lost Girl, Playing with Fire, The Magic Shades, and Secret of Lost Arrow) the girls experiment with more than one form of divination. They use a séance to answer Anne’s questions about why she was prevented from going to Cheer Camp. The answers don’t really seem to answer her questions at the time.
None of the girls has been trained in the mechanics of a séance. In fact, they haven’t been trained in any of the divinatory arts they use. They simply make it up as they go along (that’s the secret to being a good diviner, anyhow). They know what they have heard, and seen in movies, but they are willing to experiment, and that is what works for them.
There are plenty of unexpected twists and turns in this book. It will hold the interest of the young reader for sure. What secret does Anne discover while trying to get her horoscope done on the internet? How is she connected to a young woman who died? The answers are here, even if they are unexpected.
This is a fun book for the pre- and early-teen group. You don’t need to have read the previous books to enjoy it, but you will probably want to pick them up after reading this one.
And you will probably look forward to the next one in the series (Mirror, Mirror). At $4.99 each they are inexpensive, short enough to be read in a day or so, and contain some good ideas.
They are not great literature, but they are fun to read.
