Princess Academy

Shannon Hale's Princess Academy is a mountain adventure for 10 year olds about a tiny, sharp-tongued girl who is suddenly told she might marry a prince.

What happens

Miri is fourteen and smaller than girls years younger. Everyone in her village works in the quarry, cutting a beautiful white stone called linder. Everyone except Miri. Her pa has told her never to set foot in it, and she's never dared ask why. She tells herself she doesn't care (she does, very much).

Then a man from the king rides up the mountain in a fancy carriage. The priests say the prince's future bride will come from their village! So every girl from twelve to seventeen is marched off to an academy in an old stone house. For a whole year they'll learn to read, curtsy and talk like ladies. Then the prince will come to a ball and choose one of them.

The tutor, Olana, is super strict. Anyone who talks out of turn is shut in a cupboard or struck across the hand with a stick. Miri gets six strokes for helping a younger girl who's fallen behind. It's the sort of unfairness that makes you want to march in there yourself.

What makes this lovely is Miri's voice. She's funny when she's nervous, and she's nervous a lot. There's the story about an old man and a squashed fly. There's her line about the fancy visitor ("snake in a box"). And there's the way she can't think of a single clever thing to say to Peder, the boy she's always teased.

There's something magical about the quarry too. The workers can talk to each other in their heads over the noise of the hammers. Miri can only catch faint echoes of it from her hilltop, and she badly wants to hear more.

Does Miri even want to be a princess? She isn't sure. That's half the fun of it. Is it about proving she's useful to a village that has always left her out? Or about Peder? Or about the books she's only just learning to read?

What to read next

If Miri wins them over, try Shannon Hale's The Book of a Thousand Days. Dashti is a maid bricked up in a tower with her lady for seven years, and her first worry is how the food will last.