The Goose Girl (2003)
by Shannon Hale
I love Shannon Hale‘s books. My first book of hers was The Princess Academy, and I remember the lovely way I felt after reading it and seeing there was this other Shannon Hale book out there called The Goose Girl. And, for some reason, I resisted looking into it right away. Unfamiliar with the fairy tale it’s based on, my mind started making up stories about what the book was about before even cracking the cover. The Goose Girl is an incredible book (of course) and (lucky for the reader) the first of a series of four!
The Goose Girl is based on the Grimm’s fairy tale of the same title. Doing my best to sum up the novel here– Anidori is a princess in Kildenree, but is arranged to marry a prince from a neighboring kingdom to avoid war. On her three-month journey to Bayern, she is accompanied by many guards and her lady-in-waiting, Selia. As they near Bayern, things start to shift. Selia begins acting strange and a good majority of the soldiers seem to break off into Selia’s “group,” while a small number remain loyal to Princess Ani. Selia’s plan is to show up in Bayern as the princess, instead of as the lady-in-waiting, since nobody there will know otherwise. There is a mutiny in the forest, and Ani makes a close escape. She spends months working as a goose girl in Bayern while she tries to figure out how to convince the king of the truth and stop an impending war based on false information from the false princess.
There is everything in this book–adventure, danger, humor, friendship, romance, courage, and so much more. It definitely has some “darker” parts, so I’d be cautious of recommending it to too young a reader, but if you or your reader is ready for it, I can’t recommend The Goose Girl highly enough. This last read of it was a re-read for me, and I could not stop turning pages. I’m so excited to re-visit the rest of the Bayern books!