Reviewed by Dr. Karen Hutchins Pirnot for Readers' Favorite

Ellie is of the tumanhofer species. She is a goat herder who is educated and eager for adventure. Ellie is delighted when her aunt and uncle take her for a vacation to see the wedding and next coronation of the king and queen of the kingdom. Along the way, Ellie falls into an extended adventure when she goes to rescue her frisky pet goat Tax.

Ellie finds herself going through a time warp into a city contained within a bottle. The city houses dozens of perpetually young six year old urhomns, a species of gentle and intelligent giants. The children are quarrelsome and unruly until Ellie and her friend Bealomondore, an artistic tumanhofer also trapped in the bottle city, team up to tame the children and find a way to extricate themselves from the unwelcoming bottle city. They solicit the assistance of an Old One who is a librarian and several minor dragons who have various helpful abilities.

This is a delightful fairy adventure for children in the middle grades. It is filled with visual images which will certainly stimulate the interest of both girls and boys. There is just enough mystery to keep the child reading and just enough of a sense of self-efficacy in the main characters so that the child reader will identify with the character and begin to act out his or her own fantasies. The book has an all-knowing figure to which children of many religions would identify.