Barry Fillier’s Kids Book Answers a Big Question

Mike Ruta / Metroland

AJAX -- Barry Fillier is an Ajax resident who has written a children's book, 'The Trooth and Nuthin But the Tooth'. The story is a fairy tale about the tooth fairy. A book signing will take place April 11 at the Chapters in Ajax. March 27, 2015.

“Everybody asks if I’m a dentist,” says Barry Fillier.

The Ajax resident has himself to blame: he’s written a children’s book about the tooth fairy in which the good fairies have names like Flossie and Cal-Ceum and the bad ones are called Canker and Plaquette.

The Trooth and Nuthin but the Tooth has its origins in questions from Fillier’s daughter when she was a child: ‘how does the tooth fairy know?’ ‘Where do they get the money from?’ Fillier spent years in the film industry and the story was originally a movie treatment. After his first granddaughter was born, he updated it and answered an age-old question in the book, extending to Santa Claus, his reindeer and even Peter Pan and the Easter Bunny.

“Nobody has ever explained where all of these magical characters get their magic from,” Fillier notes.

The answer? It comes from tooth fairies, who grind up the baby teeth they’ve collected to make fairy dust, distributed to Santa and the rest.

Fillier’s story features Makena (named for one of his granddaughters), who has just lost her last baby tooth. The tooth fairy arrives -- his name is Cal-Ceum -- and he reveals that not only does Makena have a personal tooth fairy, Rooti, but also that she’s in trouble. It seems a full set of a child’s teeth has special power in Fairyland. The evil Cavity Crew wants the magic from the teeth for nefarious purposes and has taken Rooti hostage.

Makena goes on an adventure and helps the good fairies defeat the evil ones, ensuring her last tooth gets to Rooti.

It’s Fillier’s first book, and he went on Kijiji looking for someone to edit it. He found Ashley Lennox, who did the first edit and drew three of the characters. . Fillier self-published the book and publisher Xlibris handled the rest of the art.

Like a lot of stories, and as in the movies, there’s ample room for a sequel or even a prequel and Fillier already has an idea or two. For one, in The Trooth he didn’t explain how the tooth fairies obtain money.

He shopped the original script around years ago but didn’t get any takers, noting the response was invariably, ‘we don’t accept unsolicited scripts or treatments’. He envisioned a live-action/animated film, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit.