Mihi Ever After

Tae Keller's Mihi Ever After is a fairy-tale adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who's desperate to prove she's the princess type.

What happens

Mihi Whan Park has always felt like a princess on the inside. Lost royalty, just waiting to find her palace. In real life her family runs a pet rescue in Medford, Massachusetts, which means more barking dogs than ball gowns.

Then her best friend Genevieve tells her that princess games are babyish. And that Mihi isn't really the princess type anyway. Ouch.

Mihi decides to prove her wrong by climbing the one tree they're forbidden to climb, and lands herself in indoor recess. That's where she meets Reese, who takes things apart to see how they work, and shy Savannah, who'd rather have a castle and a pet fish than a prince.

One secret sweet from the librarian's fridge later, the three girls are staring at a rainbow forest where the fridge shelves should be. And Mihi steps straight through.

The fairy-tale world is great fun. Cinderella's mice run an Information Booth (and are very touchy about being called blind). But something is always slightly off. The mice have rather sharp teeth. They want payment. And at the castle, the girls learn that only one of them can become a princess.

Underneath the magic, this is really about fitting in. Mihi worries she's too annoying, too chubby, too babyish. Reese is one of the few Black kids at school and Savannah blushes at everything. None of them feels like the girls in the stories they love. That's a feeling plenty of children will recognise, and it's handled very kindly.

Mihi is lovely company. She's impulsive and hopeful and a bit of a walking disaster (sixteen panicked birds, five barking dogs and one forgotten apple, all before school). You can't help rooting for her.

It's a great fit for a child who adores fairy tales but has started to wonder whether those stories have room for them.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Tae Keller also wrote The Science of Breakable Things, a quieter real-world story about a girl called Natalie keeping a school science notebook while her mum hardly comes out of her room.