The Book of a Thousand Days

Shannon Hale's The Book of a Thousand Days is a gripping fairy-tale story for 10 year olds about a maid who's bricked up in a tower with her lady for seven years.

What happens

Dashti has only just become a lady's maid when it happens. Lady Saren has refused to marry the powerful lord her father chose for her, because she's promised herself to someone else. So her father has the tower door bricked up with both girls inside. Seven years, he says. And if they try to break out, the guards have orders to kill them.

Most people would despair. Dashti counts the food.

That's what I love about her. She grew up a "mucker" on the open grasslands, where her mama taught her healing songs for everything from headaches to milking yaks. She knows what it is to go hungry. So a cellar stacked with barrels and spices feels like paradise to her, bricks or no bricks.

The whole book is her diary, written by candlelight, day by day. You get every thought. Her battle with the rats in the grain sacks. Her puzzlement at the gentry (how can people with so much be so miserable?). And her quiet, stubborn kindness towards Saren, who spends most days curled up and frightened.

Saren isn't easy company. She's terrified that the lord she refused will come for her, and none of Dashti's songs seem to help. Dashti just keeps going, feeding her, singing to her and trying to work out what's wrong.

Then voices come to the wall outside, and Dashti finds herself doing something a maid should never do. She speaks to one of the gentry as if she were her lady.

It's a real slow-burn read with a fairy-tale feel, and it's very hard to put down. If your reader likes stories where the quiet girl turns out to be the brave one, they'll be rooting for Dashti from her very first entry.

There are some harder moments early on. Saren's father slaps both girls before the door is sealed. Dashti's trap for the rats is described quite plainly. And her mama has died before the story starts, which she still misses terribly. None of it is lingered over, but a more anxious reader might like to read the opening weeks of the diary with you.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Shannon Hale's Princess Academy has Miri, who lives on a mountain where everyone quarries stone and longs to be allowed to help.