Cicely Mary Barker's most popular work is undoubtedly her collections of seasonal and themes flower fairies, but this single attempt at a more traditional fairytale is also charming. Our story starts out expectedly enough with a young girl from a poor family who wants to help her family. We don't get much of the family's backstory (where is the father in this scenario and why are they living with their great uncle), but Barker is clearly working in the simplified mode of hte folktale where actual identities mean little as long as we get an informative story and things work out nicely at the end. In this story the climax occurs when our protagonist wishes for enough necklaces to wear a new one every day for a year, not knowing that two fairies are listening outside her window. In most cases this kind of greed on the part of humans resulting in unexpected gifts from the fairies ends badly as the humans learn their lessons the hard way, but our young protagonist has already proven to have a relatively selfless nature and the family's plan to give some of the necklaces away as gifts assures readers that there is a correct way to profit without greed. Barker's accompanying illustrations may not be as intrinsically interesting as her flower fairiies, but she does include a few and the human characters are executed equally well. ( )