Representing the best
Finnish authors abroad
Finnish authors abroad
Ella Aura and Tom Dahl are best friends. They play football, watch TV and listen to music together, and they contact each other every night. What makes them unique is that their conversations are often of the telepathic variety, and that Ella happens to be a felf, the daughter of an elf and a fairy. Welcome to the world of Ella, the surprisingly everyday felf-girl next door, and her very ordinary human friend Tom.
Ella and Tom are about to have a repeat encounter with the evil powers that linger on in their world. For reasons unknown, Morb, the ultimate Master of Evil through the times, and his minions pose a direct threat to Ella and Tom’s lives. Ella is targeted first but has a narrow escape. Tom is not so lucky, for he is poisoned on his birthday. The human doctors are helpless, and Ella’s healer father can only diagnose his own kind.
Trusting her father’s skills, Ella does the unthinkable and ingests the poison herself – only to learn that the flower with the power to heal her and Tom is now feared to be extinct. It takes a mismatch gang of felfs and two perilous adventures — one to the Natural History Museum in London, and another to the Peruvian cloud forests — to track down the last flowers.
The felf missions are a success but is it all too late for Ella? Morb keeps pulling her deeper and deeper into his nightmarish slumber, and Ella must fight with everything she has to make it out alive. Why is she the target of Morb’s fury?
Elena Mady has created Ella Aura’s fantastic world as a parallel one to ours, and many of the threats facing Ella and her fellow felves are identical to the ones we face. The fates of nature and children are linked together, and Mady’s message is clearly that of hope. Mady has done her research well, and with Ella and Tom we get to fly with the felves, visit parts of the Natural History Museum normally closed to visitors, befriend a merefairy with a bad haircut and a nasty attitude, have the opportunity to have a realistic adventure on an oil tanker, and we even learn the truth about micro-expressions from a real-life lie detection professor. Elena Mady’s language is crisp and current, and carries the story along at a pace suitable for young readers.
To Elena Mady, writing the Ella Aura -series has been an adventure, and so is reading it. Ella Aura and the Thirteenth Guardian is an independent sequel to the first part in the series: Ella Aura’s Doomsday Diary. The adventure continues in part three: Ella Aura and the Knights of Nagir, out in 2013.