Flyers

If there is anything Noga hates more than her big ears, it is being called “Flyer-ears,” or “Flyers” at school. One morning she wakes up and decides that all this is going to change. To hide her ears, she puts on a Chinese-style straw hat. As her feet are lifted off the ground, she realizes that the hat is much more than a cover-up it carries her over mountains and seas and takes her to the Chinese Emperor’s castle. Noga loves the luminous dolls and delicate wooden boxes with thousands of drawers, but when the Emperor asks her to stay forever, she escapes and flies away.

Returning home from China, Noga tries on hat after hat, and each one takes her to a different world. A baby’s cap makes her a sleepy baby in a crib. Her mother’s leopard-skin turban whisks her off to the desert, where a handsome caliph urges her to marry him. In a flowered bathing cap, she meets the Queen of the Sea and swims with a mermaid. Yet none of the places she visits seems perfect to Noga, and after a fantastical morning, she decides school is not so bad, “Flyers” or not.

This is a fairy tale of delicate transformations, a delightful bedtime story.