Book Review: The Princess Academy

You Can Be a Princess Too

When I was in 8th grade, my family built a house and moved to a housing development up on the hill. The houses in this area were typically a bit larger and a bit more expensive than the neighborhood we moved from. This also meant that I had to go to a different junior high school. After a while, I heard all kinds of comments from people, like “The kids at that school are all stuck up.” I couldn’t understand how someone could be so prejudiced against people they had never met. I was the same person I had always been, but by association, they were calling me stuck up too. That hurt.

Prejudice/misunderstanding is just one of the threads running through the latest book by Shannon Hale, The Princess Academy, though she doesn’t hit you over the head with it. Now before you start thinking strange things about me for reading a “Princess” book, you should know that it was selected as a 2006 Newbery Honor Book (awarded to authors of the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children), so you know it has to be fairly decent. That said, I still felt a bit self conscious letting people see what I was reading. So, I guess that would be one of my complaints. Putting “princess” in the title alienates so many readers, especially in the youth fiction circles.

That title is great if you are a young girl who longs to be Cinderella or Ariel, like my daughter, and yes, they will love it. But, you should get your boys to read it too, if they are masculine enough to read a book where all the main characters are girls. I wasn’t way back then, but I guess I am now . . . kind of.

Let me also echo one of my favorite authors, Orson Scott Card who gave glowing reviews to all three of Shannon’s books, “Some of the best contemporary literature is being written and published for children. And I'm not just talking about Harry Potter . . . I just read a book that is, quite frankly, better than any of the Harry Potter books . . . The title is, of all things, Princess Academy.”

While Princess may not match Harry Potter’s level of excitement and probably won’t sell as many books, I have to say that Shannon Hale has become my current favorite author (sorry Orson). I have now read all 3 of her books and have been thoroughly engaged in all of them. And so have all of my friends that I have gotten to read them, oh, and their friends too.

Shannon is a master of characterization. She gets you to care about and invest in the characters she brings life to. For me, this is a hard thing to do in a fantasy book, since I am not much of a fan of “traditional” fantasy. I can’t wait for her next book, which gratefully will be in September of 2006, a book called River Secrets (pre-order at Amazon), a follow on to her first two books The Goose Girl and Enna Burning.

As with her other two books, it took me a couple of chapters to get into Princess, but when I did, I was completely hooked. In Princess, the priests of the king prophesy that the future princess will come from an obscure corner of the kingdom. The problem is that only rough, uneducated villagers who quarry stone for a living make their homes there. Thus it is decreed that an academy must be set up on the top of Mount Eskel to bring these girls up to an acceptable level, if possible. But not all of them WANT to become princess. On the flipside, the villages look down on the “lowlanders” with the same amount of contempt. Neither side can concede that any good thing can come from the other land.

There is also an element of magic in the story that can be compared to mental telepathy. It is so believable that you have no problem accepting that it could be true. The story also shows that through education, the villagers are able to unlock their potential and seize their own destiny. The lowlanders and mountain folk alike learn that you can’t use an overgeneralization to characterize a group of people.

Ok, now on to the few criticisms I have. Toward the end of the story, a love connection is revealed. While it was believable, it felt quite rushed, given the pace of the rest of the book. That to me was just a bit unfulfilling, and left me feeling slightly cheated.

Also, while I did come to love the main character Miri, she seemed a bit of a Pollyanna. She never seemed to have any internal struggles with right or wrong. She did have confidence issues, which made her real enough, but I guess I just wanted more.

Overall, Hale makes you feel like you belong with the rest of the villagers and are part of their world. She makes you invest in her characters and causes you to yearn and agonize along with them. I love to read her stories and can’t wait for her next book. Although I didn't feel that The Princess Academy was quite as good as Goose Girl, I still highly recommend it. If you are a lover of good writing, read this Newberry Honor Book, then share it with children and friends alike.