Fairy Door Diaries: Eliza and the Flower Fairies

By Author / Illustrator

Megan McDonald, illus Lenny Wen

Genre

Fairy Tales & Folk Tales

Age range(s)

Publisher

Walker Books

ISBN

9781529526226

Format

Paperback / softback

Published

12-02-2026

Synopsis

From the internationally bestselling author of the Judy Moody and Stink series comes the first in a sparkling series about a girl whose love for magic and fairy folk takes her on enchanting adventures.

Stepping through a teeny-tiny door under the stairs, Eliza is transported to a world with a tangerine sun and lemon-pudding sky, a place where flower fairies perch on every bloom. But when Eliza tries to pick a strangely beautiful flower from beyond the hedgerow, things soon go terribly awry. Eliza accidentally awakens the Demon Wind and a wicked witches' curse. With the fairies and their flowers in danger of fading, Eliza must go on a quest to save her friends. But can she make it in time?

Reviews

Natalie J

Eliza and the Flower Fairies is the first title in the Fairy Door Diaries, a beautiful, illustrated chapter-book series for newly emerging readers.

The first page invites the reader to imagine a magical tiny fairy door and then to open it. On entering the door (or turning the page), the reader is transported into a captivating, enchanting, technicolour world which is inhabited by Eliza who, after arriving home from school, directly changes into her colourful play-clothes and goes into her 'Land of Understair'. In this den, soft quiet magic occurs and Eliza, together with her now alive dragonfly broach Haiku, travel through the fairy door into a world where 'a tangerine sun shone against a lemon-pudding sky'.

The lyrical language is gorgeous: so much wonderful imagery, alliteration, and plays on words. The evocative use of scents, colours and sounds is so all-encompassing that you are there, with Eliza, in this flower fairy garden. But all is not well for the witches Wolfsbane and Belladonna are accidentally awoken and they drain the world. The flowers droop, the fairies fade, the birdsong sounds out of the tune, and the bees buzz backwards. Can Eliza save the day because "a world without flowers [is] a song without notes"?

This is an entrancing, magical, delightful book, and I look forward very much to further instalments in the Fairy Door Diaries.

96 pages / Reviewed by Natalie J McChrystal Plimmer, librarian