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Pam Muñoz Ryan's Solimar: The Sword of the Monarchs is a magical fairy tale for 9 year olds about a princess-to-be who suddenly knows what's about to happen.
Solimar lives in San Gregorio, a highland kingdom in a long-ago Mexico. Every year monarch butterflies come to rest in its fir forest, and every year she goes to greet them.
This time she breaks the rules. She hops across the dangerous creek on her own to sit right in among the butterflies. Thousands land on her red shawl, strange chanting fills the air and a sunbeam pours through a gap in a boulder shaped like a sword.
Afterwards the shawl shimmers with butterfly wings. And whenever Solimar is standing in the sun and someone asks her a question, the answer just pops out. Tomorrow's weather. A lame horse. Who's about to propose to whom!
It's such fun watching her work out the rules of her gift (with a bit of help from her best friend María). The shawl has a mind of its own too. It keeps turning up wherever she is, once folded into a swan.
Solimar is a brilliant heroine. She'd rather have an obstacle course and archery than a fancy party. She wants women to have a say in how the kingdom is run. Her grandmother keeps begging her to grow out her short curls, which she has no intention of doing.
There's a darker thread coming. A greedy neighbouring king wants to buy up the butterfly forest to cut it down, and her brother Campeón has a secret plan of his own.
One thing to know. Solimar is nearly fifteen, and her quinceañera and crowning are only weeks away. So she's older than your reader, but it reads as a fairy tale for younger readers, and the only romance in these chapters is a proposal between two grown-ups.
For a reader who loves a spirited princess who would rather climb trees than wear a crown, this is a treat.
If Solimar's riding at the royal stables is what they love, Pam Munoz Ryan also wrote Paint the Wind, about a girl who plays with her late mother's toy horses and longs to know her mother's wild world.
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