Seventeen books about a brother and sister whose basement mirror drops them into a different fairy tale each time, where they immediately ruin the plot and have to fix it. The main numbering is clean. The complication is the three Abby specials, which are twice the length, sit between numbered books, and are numbered from one all over again.
Here is the whole thing in order, including where the specials go.
The short answer
Start with Fairest of All and read by number. Slot the specials in by publication: Abby in Wonderland after book ten, Abby in Oz after book thirteen, Abby in Neverland later still.
Do you have to read them in order?
Less than most. Each book is a complete visit to one fairy tale — Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty — and a reader who picks up book seven will follow it fine. What carries forward is smaller: Abby and Jonah get older, the rules of the mirror are learned gradually, and a few characters from earlier tales turn up again.
So order is worth keeping for a reader who is going to read all of them, and worth ignoring completely if a child has their heart set on the mermaid one.
Every Whatever After book in order
- Fairest of All
- If the Shoe Fits
- Sink or Swim
- Dream On
- Bad Hair Day
- Cold as Ice
- Beauty Queen
- Once Upon a Frog
- Genie in a Bottle
- Sugar and Spice
- Two Peas in a Pod
- Seeing Red
- Spill the Beans
- Good as Gold
- Just Dance
- Liar, Liar
- Mirror Mirror
The Abby specials
Three longer books in which Abby goes alone into a full-length story rather than a fairy tale:
They are roughly double the length of a regular volume and are pitched slightly older. Nothing in the main sequence depends on them, but they are the ones most readers remember, and a child who has raced through the numbered books will find them a satisfying step up rather than more of the same.
Who it suits
Readers around seven to ten, particularly ones who already know the fairy tales well enough to enjoy seeing them broken. The books are short, the chapters are shorter, and the jokes are mostly at the expense of how badly the original stories hold up. It is a common bridge out of early chapter books and into longer fantasy.
What comes after
Readers who finish these usually want either more fairy-tale revisionism or more sibling adventure. The Land of Stories is the standard next step for the first, and it is a real step up in length — worth knowing before handing it over.
Keep browsing
Every book above has a page in our catalog. The usual next series has its own guide: The Land of Stories reading order. For this reading level, see books for 9-year-olds and books for 10-year-olds, or the Magic Tree House reading order for another series this long.