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Jeremy Strong's The Karate Princess is a funny fairy tale for 8 year olds about the daughter a king has given up on.
King Stormbelly has sixteen girls. Fifteen of them are astonishingly beautiful and talented. Belinda is the sixteenth and, as her father keeps announcing in front of her, quite ordinary.
He never notices her eyes, which are the best thing about her. He does notice that she beats him at Snap.
Her mother is the clever one here. She quietly tells Belinda to lose the next game on purpose, waits until the king is skipping down the corridors singing about his sharp eyes, and only then suggests a tutor. He agrees without really understanding what he has agreed to.
Seven years go by. The king more or less forgets he has a sixteenth daughter. Then the other fifteen marry off one after another, the castle goes quiet, and he sends for her.
What happens next is the best scene in the book. Asked to show what she has learned, Belinda walks over to a stone statue of her great-grandfather, yells, spins and kicks it in half. Then she takes the head off with the side of her hand. Then she goes up the stairs chopping the banisters into pieces while the guards fly in all directions.
Then she bows to everybody, sits down, and brushes the dust off her clothes.
Her father's response is to be terrified and to marry her off to a cousin's son he has never met. "You don't have to like him. You only have to marry him," he tells her, which is exactly the sort of line children love catching a grown-up out on.
It's daft and quick, and the king is a magnificent idiot. He kicks the guards when he loses his temper, hurts his toes on their armour and goes to bed for a week blaming the queen.
Hiro Ono is a Japanese master, and the book gives him thin eyes, a bent back and a beard like an old cobweb, and has him answering plain questions with riddles about mountains and clouds. It's a dated idea of the wise Eastern teacher and it reads that way now. He's a kind character and Belinda is devoted to him, so you may want to say something about it rather than let it slide past.
If Belinda wins your reader over, there's a second one waiting. The Karate Princess in MoNsta Trouble has her bored out of her mind and going off after a two-headed, man-eating monster, which is precisely what she would do.
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