Twig by Elizabeth Orton Jones, was a delightful find from someone's blog, which unfortunately I have forgotten and therefor cannot give a hat tip where it is due.
The book is now more than 60 years old, and it reads with a charming old-fashioned quality but is also so simple and universal a story that it still made sense to my modern child. A little girl, known as Twig, lives a simple and bare-bones life, with the small and barren backyard of her apartment building described as "her whole world". When she finds an old tomato can that has been ripped in a shape that looks just like a door, she puts it out in the yard next to the dandelion flower, and hopes that a fairy will come and make its home in it. Through the magic of "Elf", a young character escaped from a story, she herself is transformed into the right size to live in the tomato can.
The adventures from there are simple and sweet, but were still of interest to Carbon as we read it to him. Although the book is older, the author seemed to be writing from her own life and her own heart, and those aspects of childhood have not changed in all these years.
We loved Twig. Cate still gets excited by a bottle cap. It was a foundational book for us in terms of elves and fairies.
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