Skip to main content

Bibliophile reviews Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

Year published: 2005
Genre: Fantasy for older children/younger teens (especially girls), coming of age story

The Story: In a medieval type fantasy country, Miri, a young girl, is coming of age among the quarry workers of the mountains. They quarry linder, a valuable kind of rock that is in demand as building material for palaces and fine houses in the lowlands. Traders come to the village once a year to trade food and other necessities for linder, but in Miri's 14th year a messenger comes from the king, proclaiming that a prophesy has foretold that the bride of the crown prince will come from the mountains. Therefore, all the mountain girls aged 12 to 17 must attend a princess academy to prepare them for meeting the prince, who will choose one of them as his bride once they are ready.
Miri's father has never allowed her to work in the quarry for reasons she doesn’t understand, making her feel like an outsider, so in a way she welcomes the chance to experience something different. She is still ambivalent as to whether it is because she wants to marry the prince (not out of any desire for power, but a simple desire to make her family comfortable), or if it’s because she wants a chance to see the world outside the mountains.
Education brings unexpected benefits to the girls and their families, but it also brings out the competitive streak in the girls. But things don’t always go as planned...

Review: Shannon Hale is perhaps best known for her spin on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale of The Goose Girl, but here she has created a totally new world and characters. The book won a Newberry honour in 2006, which can only mean that the winner must have been very, very good.

The world Miri lives in is not the kind of fantasy world that is full of big magic and monsters – as a matter of fact, it resembles a medieval version of our own world – but Hale manages to make it real, and it does have some magical qualities that I will not mention because I would like other readers to discover them for themselves.

Hale’s characterisations are realistic and lively and while some of the girls are ‘types’, they do change and grow and the reasons for their behaviour, be it meanness, bossiness, xenophobia, shyness, etc. are explained, so they can’t really be called stereotypes. Miri is the focus of the story, i.e. the partially omniscient narrator tells the tale exclusively from her point of view, so the reader gets to sit inside her head and see the world through her eyes.

The writing is excellent and the plotting is good, and while I did see the big twist coming, it may still come as a pleasant surprise to a younger reader.

This is the sort of book that is liable to become a perennial read for girls, much like The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables. It is no coincidence that I mention these two books, because like them, Princess Academy is a gripping coming of age story about a girl who feels like she is an outsider, but who discovers unknown strengths and talents in herself and finds acceptance and friendship.

Rating: An excellent coming of age story for girls of all ages. 4+ stars.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Every review I've read, including yours, say that this book is awesome! I have it on hold at the library right now but there is quite the wait for it. I am looking forward to reading it!
Bibliophile said…
I'm sure you will love it.
Anonymous said…
I just read Hale's 'Book of a Thousand Days' and loved the lyrical nature of her writing. I will definitely have to check out this fantasy book, as I'm sure it will be another hit.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme