The Goose Girl

This impressive first novel by a new American writer typifies the growing tendency for classic folktale to find new life in the full-length modern children’s story. Drawing on traditional romance and magic with its potential for thoughtful allegory, The Goose Girl creates an imaginary medieval world. Here a betrayed and dispossessed princess discovers magical powers, wars are fought with swords and javelins, and royal journeys take months on horseback through vast empty forests. But important modern parallels are there for those who look. Crown Princess Anidori of remote little Kildenree, intuitively able to communicate with animals and natural forces but inept at ‘people-speaking’, is deprived of the succession by the queen her mother and instead sent to a political marriage with the heir to powerful and warlike Bayern, the neighbouring kingdom. En route she is betrayed by her lady-in-waiting, who displaces her, and is forced to earn her living as a goose girl in Bayern until she can reclaim what is rightfully hers. Her experience as a lowly goose girl makes her a wiser and more confident princess. She is finally able to stop the war which militant Bayern, misinformed by the false princess and its own warmongering prime minister, is about to launch against harmless Kildenree. This is a highly readable, suspenseful and captivating novel. No doubt unintentionally, it also becomes a striking allegory about powerful, violent, trigger-happy countries which use fabricated dangers to justify pre-emptive warfare against faraway weak nations.