A True Princess

Diane Zahler's A True Princess is a Nordic fairy tale for 9 year olds about a foundling girl who overhears that she is about to be sold to the village miller.

What happens

Lilia tells the story herself, which is a large part of why it works. She is crouched under the farmhouse window with the sheepdog when she hears her stepmother say it. Lilia will have to go.

She is almost thirteen and has lived with this family since Jorgen pulled her out of the river in a basket when she was two. Nobody ever came looking for her. Nobody ever explained the basket.

Ylva has done the sums. A new baby is coming, Lilia eats too much, and the miller will pay in coppers and flour.

What makes the opening land is how unsparing Lilia is about herself. She daydreams. She forgets half of what she is told. Her porridge is so lumpy it is nearly inedible. She never sleeps properly on a bed, which is a very good joke for anyone who knows the fairy tale this is built on.

Something to be ready for, right at the start. The miller is described as a burly man with rough hands who has six children and beats them all, and Lilia is quite clear that he would hit a servant more often than that. Her stepmother calls her useless as a barren ewe and will not let her eat at the table with the others.

None of it happens to her on the page. It is the reason she runs, and it is over within the first chapter. But if your reader finds cruelty at home hard to sit with, this opening is blunt about it, and Lilia's own question about whether someone put her in that river to save her or to be rid of her is a genuinely dark thought for a child to be carrying.

The world around all this is gorgeous. It is nearly Midsummer, when the sun does not really set and Lilia can see in the dark almost as well as daylight. Every farm has a nisse living under it, waist high in a red cap, who turns the milk pails upside down when he is annoyed and gets furious if you look straight at him.

There is a boy called Kai she cannot bring herself to say goodbye to, and a dream of flying over pine trees under a sky pulsing green and purple. You can feel the quest gathering before anyone says the word.

What to read next

If they like a familiar story retold from an odd corner of it, Rump gives the Rumpelstiltskin tale to the boy everyone laughs at, who also does not know his own full name.