Review: Princess Academy: Palace of Stone

Wow, that's a bunch of colons in the title. Oops?

Change is returning to Mount Eskel in the second book of this trilogy as the girls of the princess academy pack their bags and head to Asland for Britta's upcoming wedding to Steffan. Going along with them is Peder, who's to be apprenticed to a stonecarver in the city in the hopes that he'll be able to bring those talents back to the mountain when his year is up.

Peder's not the only one with plans, though: Miri's going to attend the Queen's Castle university, thanks to some strings Britta pulled. She's hoping she'll be able to learn everything there is to know in just one year, but once she arrives, she realizes that there's more knowledge in the world than she could have ever imagined.

She gets to work, though, making friends with a merchant's son named Timon. Timon hangs out with a bunch of reformers who want to help the "shoeless" peasants of Danland by ending the monarchy. At first, Miri really enjoys the discussions she has with Timon and his friends - their points make sense, and she's afraid of what might happen to Mount Eskel if some of the king's harsher decrees get enacted. However, she's also fully loyal to Britta, and is slow to understand that the rebels don't just want her off the throne - they want Britta dead. The way they see it, she stole the opportunity to be the princess away from the "real" Eskelite girls.

As tensions rise and riots start, Miri has to figure out a way to support both the peasants and the princess. She uses the tools she knows best: lessons from the princess academy, manual labor, and quarryspeaking, which has its own equivalent in the royal family, eerily enough. (There's a reason only royals get to live inside the linder walled portion of the palace, apparently.) Will she be able to support Britta without abandoning the shoeless? And is Timon a better choice for her than Peder?

(Spoiler alert: no.)

I actually really enjoyed this book during this reread. I'd read it back when it came out, and I remember feeling a vague sense of disappointment for whatever reason. That feeling didn't come back to me this time around.

I think it helps that I'm a bit older: Miri's struggles in a new place feel very similar to going off to college in the real world, and it's easy to understand how hard it is for her to wrap her head around all these new viewpoints and opinions she's being exposed to. She also begins to question whether she feels more at home in Asland or on Mount Eskel, which is also relatable for any new college kid. Her final realization about which place is home is such a good realization for all of us.

I'm always gonna hate Timon, though. He's very cocky and doesn't seem to get that Miri's upbringing was not like his own, so of course she's not going to understand some of his opinions or decisions. He also can't seem to wrap his head around the fact that Miri and Britta are genuinely best friends, which spurs all the trouble in the last quarter or so of the novel. He really needs to realize that the way he sees the world isn't necessarily the right way to see the world.

Overall, Palace of Stone is a good read for anyone who's just gone off to college, even though they're not the "intended" audience. Miri's new challenges and experiences resonate well, and it's lovely to see all the Eskelite girls learn new skills they can bring back to the mountain when their year's up. Five stars.

Review: Princess Academy

Guys, I'll tell it to you straight: I want this to be required reading for like 5th or 6th graders everywhere. I just love it so much.

Miri Larendaughter feels useless. The only industry there is on Mount Eskel is quarrywork, but her father has never let her set foot in the mines, making her the only person (besides the very old and the very young) who doesn't help out with the linder. (Linder is fairly similar to marble, fyi.) The best she hopes to do is make good deals with the lowlander traders who come with food and supplies every season.

And then the bombshell drops: Mount Eskel has been divined as the home of the future princess of Danland, in accordance with the ancient tradition. Now every girl between twelve and seventeen will be forced to attend a year-long academy to teach them how to read, how to write, and how to behave, among other subjects.

None of the girls are pleased with this annoucement - how are their families supposed to mine enough linder to feed themselves if much of the workforce is gone? They comply with the decree begrudingly, though, and soon over a dozen girls are off to the old minister's house where the academy will be housed.

Their teacher is Tutor Olana, a snobby woman who's used to the finery of Asland, the capital city. She's very strict, too, and kind of a terrible teacher - she punishes a girl for speaking out of turn, and then again for not understanding the lesson she missed while in punishment. Miri studies hard, though, eventually learning more than just book lessons.

You see, the quarriers use what they call "quarry-speech" to communicate over the din of the mines. It's similar to mind-reading, and it's only ever worked in the quarry before - at least, until Miri unwittingly uses it one day in the academy. She figures out through much trial and error that it works via the linder itself, not the mines, and that the reason orphaned lowlander Britta couldn't hear it in the mines is because she doesn't have the lifelong proximity to the stone that the others do.

The tables turn on Olana once the girls put their newfound knowledge to use, and even the traders are forced to reckon with the girls when Miri realizes that linder is worth much more than the traders were giving them. Everything's going smoothly for once as the academy ball approaches, where the girls will meet the prince for the first time.

And then he leaves without choosing any of them to be his bride, leaving them stuck at the school until spring thaw.

Even worse? Bandits attack the girls a few days later, believing that one of them is the future princess and is just trying to keep it a secret. Will Miri be able to summon help from the village to save their lives? And who's the prince going to pick, anyway?

Like I said, I love this book, you guys. Miri is so relatable - she just wants to feel useful, maybe even important, and I think a lot of young teens (and maybe even twenty-somethings) can understand that. Also, everyone's sympathetic after a while. Olana's not an Umbridge-esque irredeemable villain, and Katar, one of the meaner girls, is shown to be dealing with problems of her own. I really love how Princess Academy humanizes everyone without treating the villains like special misunderstood snowflakes.

I'm also a huge fan of the writing style. The language is lyrical and reminiscent of old fairy tales without being hard to follow or overly purple. The chapters also open with snippets of lyrics from songs the characters know, which is a cute way of introducing what's going to happen, in my opinion. The one problem I have with more grown-up fantasy is that the language can get overly complex and fussy, so I love finding good children's books that tell mature stories with simpler language.

Another choice I love from this book is that - spoiler alert - Miri doesn't become the princess. The academy helps her figure out what she really does want from life, and it feels good - a nice blend of her pre-academy and post-academy lives. I appreciate that she didn't have to become royal to be happy.

Overall, Princess Academy is an amazing fairy tale. No monsters, sure, but there are plenty of "real world" problems that will keep you entertained throughout the book. Five stars.

(also, who do I need to call about making this a movie and getting cast as the lead? We are the same body type, you guys.) 

Review: Forest Born

And with this I'll finally move on from the Books of Bayern!

...Only to still have like six books in my backlog. Oy. Let's worry about that later, though.

So in the final Book of Bayern, our protagonist is Rin, Razo's beloved little sister. She's lived in the Forest with Ma and the rest of her huge family all her life, but recently, she's been feeling like she doesn't belong, like the very trees want to shun her.

No, seriously: Rin's always felt some communion with trees, but now they just fill her with a sick, shameful feeling whenever she tries to connect with them. She claims she's not sure why that is, but her veneer gets more and more cracked as the novel goes on.

To avoid the sickening tree feeling, Razo and Dasha take Rin back to the capital with them and secure her a position as one of Isi's ladies in waiting. Rin instantly falls in love with Tusken, Isi and Geric's two year old son, and protects him from untrustworthy servants like a fierce mama bear. Everything's going fairly well-

-until Geric and his company get attacked by fire speakers on their way back to the capital. Isi, Enna, and Dasha immediately pack up their things, partly to make sure their partners are okay, but mostly to use their own gifts to smoke out whoever tried to harm Geric. They decide to take Tusken along, too, once Rin and Isi learn that the untrustworthy servant, Celie, can't be found anywhere, and that means Rin is also going to travel as Tusken's nanny.

The girls meet up with the boys easily and the three "Fire Sisters," as Rin calls them, decide to continue on towards Kel, the source of all the fire speaking rumors. They try to go off alone, but Rin sneaks along after them desperately - being around the three of them, Isi especially, has finally relieved some of Rin's stress, and she doesn't want to let that go.

As they travel, Rin discovers that she's pretty good at getting people to respond to her desires - maybe even unnaturally good. Isi and Enna's talk about people speaking and how terrible it is plants a new fear in her mind, especially once the four girls meet the Queen of Kel and learn that she's kidnapped Tusken and Razo in order to extort Isi.

Who is the Queen of Kel? Can Rin break the Fire Sisters out of the dungeon? Most importantly, will Rin finally accept the truth about herself and her abilities? I'm not going to spoil that for any of you.

Forest Born is pretty cool, in my opinion, because it's just slightly different from the first three Books of Bayern. In the first three, Isi, Enna, and Razo all have the words and knowledge to give names to their powers - Isi knows she can speak with wind, Enna can read her fire knowledge, and Razo has seen both of these powers in action. Rin, however, doesn't understand that her quirks are actually powers like those of the Fire Sisters. She just thinks she's different and wrong, which is a really interesting take on the whole "person discovers their quirks are actually magic" genre.

(However, after three novels where the protagonists are all well aware of magic, Rin's total lack of functional descriptive language can make the book a little slower to read at times. I admit that that could just be my personal shortcoming, though.)

I also love how Forest Born brings the series full circle. Again, not spoiling the ending, but the explanations given for how this story is possible fit together easily, and also make sense of one of the catalysts from Enna Burning, too. I realize we should expect novels to have good continuity, but some plot twists just work better than others, and this is one of the truly well-written ones.

The last thing I want to say about Forest Born is that it doesn't include a romance, unlike the other three, and I love that. Rin's biggest struggle in this book is figuring who she is and what she can do - she's not in the right place to fall in love. Her self-discovery comes from inner strength and loving familial and platonic relationships, which we just don't see enough in literature. While I don't mind romantic relationships that help the protagonist learn more about themselves, people need to see that those aren't the only kind of relationships that are worthwhile and important.

Overall, Forest Born is a great conclusion to a fantastic series that tells of one girl's journey to self-esteem but also wraps up a larger, overarching plot in a clean, engaging way. Four stars.

Review: River Secrets

And now, back to our previously scheduled Shannon Hale blogging. Only one book left after this!

(And then like seven non-SH books that I have backlogged. Oops.)

River Secrets focuses on Razo, Enna and Isi's friend from the previous novels. (It's also the only Book of Bayern to have a male protagonist, on a somewhat related note.) It's set only a few months after the end of the war from Enna Burning, after Geric and Isi meet with the Tiran rulers and decide there should be an exchange of ambassadors (I tried to type "am-badass-adors", thanks, Glee) to foster goodwill among the citizens of both Tira and Bayern. Geric's cousin Lady Megina will be Bayern's ambassador, and Finn, Enna, and Razo are chosen to go along as part of her guard.

It's easy to see why Finn gets to go: he's the best swordsman in Bayern's Own, the king's personal group of soldiers. Enna, too, is fairly obvious: she wields fire, and she'd like to atone for all her destruction from the war. Razo, though?

Razo's not so sure why he's included. The only thing he's good at is slinging, but that's not really a weapon, is it?

Razo gamely packs up his things and goes anyway, hoping for the best. The trip is going pretty smoothly, too - until he discovers a burned body along the edges of their campsite after they've crossed the Tiran border. He goes to Talone, their captain, after stumbling across the corpse, and they bury it together, trying to figure who might have done it.

Enna is their first guess, naturally, though Razo hopes it's not her. The evidence begins to pile up, though, especially once they reach Ingridan, the Tiran capital, and Enna can't be the one committing these crimes. So who is it, then?

Talone puts Razo on the case, admitting that he brought Razo along because he has all the makings of a natural spy. Razo is floored to hear this, but it doesn't disappoint him in the least. He starts poking around even more, making friends with the kitchen girls, the prince of Tira, and Dasha, the Tiran ambassador's daughter.

Dasha is a mystery to Razo - she's funny and sweet, but she's also a Tiran, and Razo's not sure which Tirans he can trust right now. She hangs around the rivers a lot, too, and since that's where Talone and Razo have had to dump some of the bodies, that makes her pretty suspicious.

The truth comes out eventually: Dasha has water speaking - just add her to the list of girls with magical powers that Razo knows. She also doesn't know a language to balance it, so she's just like Enna and Isi in their overburdened stages. Dasha's figured out Enna is the "fire witch," and she's hoping Enna will teach her fire to help her live. Enna doesn't trust any Tirans, though, especially when they've got their own fire witches running around now.

Razo thinks Enna will help Dasha if Dasha proves she's trustworthy by helping Razo find the Tiran fire workers, so they go off on one last slapdash adventure together to finally learn who's causing all this trouble in Ingridan. Will they be able to alert the others in time? That's up to you to learn.

After all the angst and seriousness of Enna Burning, it's really nice to be able to turn to Razo's mind in River Secrets. While the stakes are still high, Razo's cheerful, joke-happy personality makes the read feel lighter, even when he's near death in a strange land with the girl he likes. I also like that Razo was the protagonist of this novel, rather than trying to read in Dasha's voice or something similar. It's fun seeing the powers of wind speech and fire speech from an outsider's perspective instead of the up close and personal look of the last two novels.

Having Razo really acclimate to Tira was also a good narrative choice, in my opinion. Isi and Enna both have strong ties to Bayern, and Razo's more willing to see the good and the bad of his host country, allowing him to make some interesting blends of both cultures. Having Razo learn that the Bad Guys aren't just two-dimensional enemies helps teach a subtle, important lesson to the readers.

I think River Secrets is probably my second favorite Book of Bayern, after The Goose Girl. Razo's story is thrilling and amusing, and really helps him develop from the funny bit character to a person in his own right - or maybe a tree rat in his own right? Five stars.

Review: Enna Burning

And now I'm back on the Shannon Hale train, after taking a break from rereading this series to read The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet. I think I'm going to alternate reviews of this with reviews of other books, though, just to keep things interesting around here.

Let's get down to business.

Enna Burning is the second book in the Books of Bayern series, and it focuses on Isi's best friend Enna, as you may have guessed. It's two years after the events of The Goose Girl, and Enna's back home in the Forest when her brother, Leifer, returns. Leifer seems jumpy and easily agitated now, which isn't like him. He's even talking about storming the castle and demanding the king's respect. Enna promptly shuts that down, prompting Leifer to try to set her on fire.

Yeah.

Enna travels back to the capital after that, hoping Isi might have some advice for her. However, it turns out that Isi isn't doing too well, either. Her wind speech is distracting and exhausting her to the point of uselessness, and no one knows how to stop it.

More pressing than Isi's problem, though, is the sudden invasion of Tira, the country to the southeast. They're attempting to take over Bayern lands that they claim once belonged to them, so now the countries are at war. This at least gives Leifer a new focus for his fiery fury - until he burns himself up on the battlefield.

Enna's grief drives her to read the vellum Leifer had that taught him how to work fire. She's hoping she'll be able to control it like her brother never could, and she wants to feel connected to him again. To keep her from burning up like Leifer did, Enna implements three rules: no burning big, no burning people, and no telling anyone, even Isi.

These rules work out okay for Enna at first, but then the war augury is held, and Enna accidentally interferes in order to save Finn's (and thus, Bayern's) life. She believes in the power of the augury, so now Enna believes that she must help the war effort by using her fire speech to burn supplies at the Tiran camps. In an attempt to keep herself under control, she enlists Razo's help - he's going on scouting missions anyway, so she sneaks along and burns random tents as a distraction. Finn ends up coming along once Razo realizes Enna's more out of control than she thinks.

Finally, Razo and Finn tell Enna she needs to stop burning, but the fire has her so caught up that she sneaks out one night to go burn the symbolic gallows the Tirans constructed in one of their camps. She manages to set it alight, but she also manages to get captured as a prisoner of war.

The only person she really interacts with after being captured is Sileph, a Tiran captain with a silver tongue. He slowly begins to convince Enna that she is powerful, beautiful, and totally capable of stopping the war with her burning - as long as she burns what he tells her to. Enna has no other option but to go along with him, though she does put up a fight whenever he tries to cross the line. She can't fight him too much, though - Razo and Finn also got captured, and Sileph says it's because they were trying to assassinate her.

Enna is falling in love with Sileph and his charm, but all that hits the wall when Isi sneaks into the Tiran camp disguised as a worker. She tells Enna a story that helps her realize Bayern still wants her, which gives Enna new plans to make an escape. Enna also overhears that Sileph has actually been giving the commands to keep her subdued and submissive to him, not this mysterious Captain Tiedan he's been talking about. Hurt and angry, Enna breaks free one night, taking Razo and Finn with her. The three of them travel to the battlefield, where the last great stand of the war is taking place. Enna burns for Bayern one last time, but she almost kills herself in the process.

This action makes Isi put her foot down. She's been reading about Yasid, a country where many people are supposedly able to speak to fire without facing the negative side effects that Enna has. They sneak off one night after claiming they're just going back to the Forest, a months-long journey that only gets more harrowing once Enna realizes Isi's pregnant and, oh, Sileph's found them again and wants revenge.

The girls (and Finn, making a surprise re-appearance) make it to Yasid, but the teachers there say they don't have the time to teach Enna water speech. Can Enna and Isi figure out a way to relieve them both of their nature-speaking burdens? Will Isi have the baby on the road? That's for you to find out, potential reader.

You know how some series have a sophomore slump at the second book? Enna Burning isn't one of those novels. The characters are thrown into completely different situations from the first book, but they remain as captivating and well-written as ever. Enna, Razo, Finn, and Isi all develop as people, but their choices are never inconsistent with what they might have done in The Goose Girl.

I also really like how Sileph's treatment of Enna was handled. He deliberately abuses her in order to get her to conform to his wishes, and she doesn't just shake that off like it was nothing. It's more apparent in book three, River Secrets, but Enna definitely has some trust issues after that, which adds a very real theme to such a magic-based book series.

Going off of that, I love the way the nature speaking works, too. In so many stories, people can shape wind or fire or what-have-you with no negative consequences except maybe temporary exhaustion, but Hale chose to take that a step further in the Books of Bayern and make it necessary for people to balance their magics simply in order to stay sane. While I can't say I think it wouldn't be cool to know fire speech, I appreciate how this story reminds the reader that "all magic comes with a price," to quote Rumpelstiltskin.

The last thing I want to talk about is Enna and Isi's friendship. (And maybe how Razo and Finn come in to that, too.) While this book has its romantic subplots, a major portion of it is also about true friendships and how they affect people. Both Enna and Isi would have suffered greatly (like, more than they already did) if the other girl hadn't been around to take care of her and push her forward. Razo and Finn also obviously care about Enna and Isi, nicely disproving the "boys and girls can't be friends!" adage. All of these people would have been totally screwed without each other, and I love how their platonic relationships aren't coded as "lesser" just because they don't like to kiss each other, too. Enna and Isi's relationship might even be closer than Isi and Geric's in some respects!

Basically, if you like realistic magic, fairy tales, and stories about friendship, you need to read Enna Burning, like, yesterday. Five stars.

Review: The Goose Girl

This is going to be an exercise in not just crying over a book I adore today, you guys. I could just save up my reread of the Books of Bayern for an AWDML post, but I'm not going to, because that's how much I love these books.

(And also, there are only four. That's a little more achievable to review one-by-one.)

Although this is a book of Bayern, the story opens in the neighboring country of Kildenree, at the birth of our protagonist, Crown Princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, or Ani, for people who don't like needing to take deep breaths just to say someone's name. Ani is a sickly baby at first, but the arrival of her somewhat magical aunt helps her take to life. Ani's aunt teaches her about birdspeech and communicating with horses, which doesn't please Ani's traditionally minded mother. Before long, the aunt is sent away and Ani must learn how to be a proper crown princess.

Ani doesn't take to crown princess-ing, though - she's shy and fearful of screwing up, and she doesn't believe she can compare to her forceful, smooth-tongued mother, especially since her mother has the gift of people-speaking, according to Ani's aunt. People-speaking allows folks to get what they want just through the power of using some carefully chosen words, and Ani's mother isn't the only person in Kildenree who can people-speak. Ani's lady in waiting, Selia, also has the power.

Regardless of how good she is at people-speaking, Ani believes that one day, she will be the next queen of Kildenree - it's her right as firstborn. Upon Ani's father's death, however, her mother makes the announcement that Ani's little brother Calib will be king, and informs Ani that she has been betrothed to the prince of Bayern as part of a peace treaty. Ani isn't pleased about this, but she realizes that she doesn't have any other options and decides to go along with the plan. She and her retinue - a group of guards and Selia - will have to travel for months through the forest that separates Kildenree and Bayern, which is both terrifying and exciting to Ani, who has never been outside the palace walls. The journey seems to be progressing along smoothly-

-until Selia betrays Ani.

Selia has always been jealous of Ani's royal status, though she's made sure Ani hasn't noticed, and she's managed to convince a few of Ani's guards to support her in her quest to assume Ani's identity. They begin to slaughter the guards who remain faithful to Ani, and Ani has to flee into the woods, wounded and alone. Ani wanders around in a daze before finally passing out in the yard of a Bayern woman named Gilsa, a Forest dweller. Gilsa and her son Finn help nurse Ani back to health and allow her to go along with Finn into the capital city for marketday, where Ani plans on trying to find a way back home.

Of course, things don't really work out as planned. Ani's long blonde hair and her accent instantly mark her as Someone Not From Around Here, and she has no concrete ideas on how to actually get out of the city undetected - after all, if Selia finds her, she'll kill her. Ani can solve her hair issues by hiding it under hats and headscarves and her talent for mimicry helps her fake a Bayern accent, but the getting out of Bayern problem proves the most difficult. She ends up getting to see the king of Bayern as he hears complaints, and he helps her find a job as his goose girl, which will enable her to save up some money over the winter and buy a place in a trade caravan back to Kildenree next year. It's not really what she was hoping for, but it's not the worst that could happen.

Goosekeeping is hard, but Ani - now going by Isi, to keep her identity a secret - really takes to it after a few months. She learns how to speak goose, and she makes her first real friends in Enna, Razo, and the other animal keepers. Her fellow goose keeper, Conrad, doesn't take as much of a shine to her, but they work out an unsteady truce after a while.

Ani also meets Geric as she's out in the pastures, another palace worker who's in charge of guarding the young prince. They get off to a bit of a rough start, since both of them are hopeless at social interactions, but after a while, they start developing feelings for each other.

At least, until Geric sends her a note saying he can't see her anymore.

That's a setback for Ani, but it's not quite as traumatizing as her repeated close calls with her traitorous ex-guardsmen, who are still on the lookout for her in Bayern. They almost capture her one night, but she manages to run back to Gilsa's and pass out in her yard again. (I can't imagine Gilsa wants Ani to keep this foolishness up.) While recuperating at Gilsa's, Ani discovers that her lead guardsman, Talone, is alive and staying with another Forest family. Talone was fiercely loyal to Ani, and he's willing to help her go back into Bayern and finally reclaim her title, especially now that rumors are flowing about Selia's plans to wage war on Kildenree in order to keep her treachery secret.

Ani, Talone, and Finn travel back to the animal keepers' housing in the city, where Enna (who accidentally came across Ani with her hair unbound one night and thus learned everything) has already told the rest of the workers Ani's story. They're all on her side as well, and thus the plans are set for Ani and her "yellow band" to travel to the impending wedding of Selia and her prince and plead their cause.

The only two snags: Selia's already given the king a backstory where she claims Ani is the treacherous waitingwoman, and Geric's not who he said he is. Geric is actually the elder prince of Bayern, and he seems to be willing to leave Ani at Selia's mercy.

Until the tide turns, that is.

As I said above, I looooove this novel. The story itself is compulsively readable, and its language is both fairy tale-esque and easy to understand, probably in part because it's technically a children's novel. (Personally, I say screw age ranges, but I get that some people don't like reading things that are "too young.")

The characters are what really make this novel shine, however. Ani starts the story naive, immature, and powerless, but she grows to understand that her own talents are just as useful as more outwardly-practical ones, and she becomes dedicated to ending the injustices the citizens of the Forest face as she sees how hard their lives can be. Ani also learns that her aunt's stories about wind-speaking weren't just stories - once she's given the tools, she learns how to understand and shape air itself, which is so incredibly cool.

The side characters are all wonderful people, too. Enna is a firecracker, Razo is goofy and genuine, and Conrad is not the one-sided angry young man he could so easily have been in a lesser story. Their influence (along with Gilsa, Finn, Geric, and Talone's) helps Ani really discover what it means to have friends standing alongside you and a home you want to protect.

If you're looking for a story that incorporates both the dark and light aspects of fairy tales as we know them into one cohesive, fantastic narrative, I can't recommend The Goose Girl enough. The writing style and the characters are real standouts, and we get to follow them into more adventures as the series progresses, so don't worry about getting attached just to watch your favorites be ripped away from you a la GRRM. Five stars and all my highest praise.