Find That Book

Hi, everyone—

New here. I’ve been trying to find this story for a while, to no avail; I wonder if anyone here would be interested.

(I previously found another children’s spooky story, Janni Lee Simner’s “Drawing the Moon,” with the help of one of these communities, but unfortunately this one has been more difficult.)

This story might have been in one of those Bruce Coville collections [in which I had previously found “Drawing the Moon”], but I'm not completely sure; the tone doesn't seem like the stories collected in one of those. I really hated this story as a child and probably would not want to read it even now—it's absurdly mean-spirited, to say the least, for a children's story—but I'd just like to know what it is to assuage the memory.

The plot (SPOILERS) is like this: the protagonist is a young girl—I have no idea what her name was, but let's say it was something like “Janie.”

Well, one day Janie discovers there is a community of fairies that live in the woods near her house. She enters the fairyland--plays and dances and dines with the fairies, all the sort of thing mythology advises not to do, etc.

Now, Janie has read mythology and fairy tales and regrets consuming fairy-food, for she knows she'll be forced to stay in fairyland. At the last moment, though, she manages to escape, coming to a realization that it is better to stay with parents who love her.

This is where we would expect the story to end, but Janie rushes back home and is so happy to see her mom and dad. That night, she goes to bed, but she wakes up in the middle of the night, thirsty, and goes downstairs to get a drink of water. On the stairs, she hears her parents saying something like this:

"Boy, Janie's really boring, isn't she?"

"Oh, yeah. I wish we'd never had her. What a brat."

Janie rushes out of the house, crying, and goes back to rejoin the fairies.

Yes, this was a remarkably mean-spirited children's story that bothered me--as you can tell from "Drawing the Moon," my library had the most unusual collections of children's stories, some of which were probably inappropriate for the age group.



OK, so does anyone know this story?

Thanks in advance!