F Synopsis

Once upon a time... Two children, a girl called Nellie and her younger brother George, were sent to spend the summer on Fairy Oak Farm. The Farm belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Coombs, cousins of their father's.

Nellie is not happy about this at all - she'd rather sleep on the floor while her parents move house than spend the summer in the country with virtual strangers. George, on the other hand, is thrilled to be in a place where there are trees and streams and fresh air. No sooner have they deposited their bags in their new room than George persuades his sullen sister to explore the Fairy Oak Forest with him. In the middle of their game of hide and seek, George disappears.
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	Thinking her brother is playing a joke on her, Nellie returns to the Farm. On the way back, she runs into an unpleasant little man who tells her that George is gone - away with the faeries. Nellie doesn't stay to listen to this gibberish. She runs back to the Farm to find that someone has been eating the honey cakes her mother had packed for their journey.
She flings open the cupboard door, expecting to find a gleeful, crumb-covered George. Instead she is confronted by Broom.

Having met a real-live hobgoblin, Nellie is now convinced that there is more to Fairy Oak Farm than meets the eye. When Broom also tells her that George is probably away with the Faeries, she has no choice but to believe him. And -so her adventure in Fairyland begins.

Nellie finds George in the fairy palace, in the heart of Fairyland. He has made the acquaintance of five friendly faeries -Chudley, Huccaby, Merrivale and Starcross. That's the good news. The bad news is that he's just eaten a fairy cake and is thus bound by fairy law to remain in Fairyland forever. Forever? Nellie is not prepared to accept this and approaches the Prince to see if there's anything that he can do. There is. He knows another law that says that if a human who has eaten fairy food completes three tasks, he or she will then be free to leave Fairyland. Nellie and George agree to complete the tasks.

What Nellie and George don't yet know is that the Shapeshifter, the Prince's wicked twin brother, is trying to get rid of the Prince so that he can take over Fairyland - and that they are part of his evil plan to gain his rightful place at the palace.

The first task turns out to be

to bring Brigid, the Coombs' beautiful farmhand, to Fairyland so that the Prince can ask her to marry him. Thanks to the Shapeshifter, the wedding turns into a war. But Nellie and George manage to save the day.

The Shapeshifter's next attempt to gain power involves forcing Brigid - who is now Princess Brigid - to steal the Royal Orb from the Prince in exchange for the newborn baby of her best friend Helen. The Shapeshifter has stolen the baby and won't give him back until Brigid, Nellie and George bring him the Orb. Brigid, not knowing the power of the Orb, does as she's told. She then discovers that the Orb is what gives the Faeries their youth and beauty. Without it, they quickly age and die. Nellie and George sneak into the Shapeshifter's lair to get the Orb back. They replace it with a fake one. When the Shapeshifter leaves his lair, thinking that his brother and all the faeries are dead, leaving him the throne, he is ambused by the rejuvenated faeries and put in the dungeon -- his rightful place at the palace.

By the end of the story, George is free from the fairy claim on his life. He can now go home whenever he likes. But Nellie, much to George's delight, declares that she doesn't want to go home yet. She wants to stay at Fairy Oak Farm. And so they all lived happily ever after....