ZEEE

First published in 1965, an entrancing story about a "bad fairy" who's really "bad about only one thing": people. But bumblebee-sized Zeee has ample provocation: each time she sets up her delectably described, Borrower-style housekeeping—under a dock leaf, in an old pail on the beach, or in an empty wasp's nest—people, who can't see her, blunder in and destroy her home. Her retaliation is poetically just: e.g., her friends the moles dig up the immaculate lawn of the man who thought her dock-leaf roof was a weed. In the end, a little girl named Pandora does see Zeee, suggests that her name could be Hope, and offers a home; but it's the details along the way, not the tidy conclusion, that give the story its considerable charm—nicely echoed in Gaber's bright new watercolors, where tiny Zeee is appropriately diaphanous and baleful and the landscape and other inhabitants (like a cat that wonders whether Zeee "tastes like bird") are viewed intriguingly from her perspective. An appealing new presentation. (Fiction/Picture book. 6-10)