Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
After reading the previous Hale book, I wanted to see if her other work was as promising. Another book from the children’s section, Princess Academy was just as nicely written and just as nicely edited. It is a previous work, and I think Shannon Hale’s writing has improved with experience. I might have thought I just preferred the other story, but if you had asked me to choose by summary, Princess Academy would have been my first read.
Princess Academy is about a world where the Prince is told by the royal diviners where his bride will hail from. So all the eligible girls are sent to an ad hoc princess academy. [Speaking of ad hoc... I mean that in the "assembled for a specific purpose" sense, not the "thrown together haphazardly without care" sense... this is an important distinction that Cory Doctorow neglected to mention throughout his entire work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which depended upon that definition. Without understanding that there is a completely contrary definition to the common usage, most of the Doctorow book made no sense. He kept saying that his bizarre "whuffie" system made perfect sense because it was designed by an ad hoc committee--- which I understood to mean, "thrown together by unskilled people who don't know what they're doing" instead of "designed by forethinking people with the best economic and sociological minds in the world who built it and then went back to their day jobs."]
The village divined is a stone quarry village that’s only nominally part of the same kingdom so the herald and the academy staff look down on the villagers.
There is some time spent about how the girls get along together. There is some time spent talking about village life— and explaining the details to lowlander girl who moved there earlier— this includes a bizarre form of magic that doesn’t seem especially important. All of this was interesting, but it was not very cohesive. It all works together, but it seems rather accidental instead of being especially chosen as a means to convey the underlying story.
We do not really get to know the characters we meet. They are superimposed caricatures, then suddenly there is a paradigm shift from the main character’s point-of-view and everyone is someone completely different. It was less interesting than if there had been a steady build-up to that. I didn’t like one of the crux points in the story where the main character brings home drastic changes, the story presents them all as universally positive, but I am not convinced that much change without examination is not going to have long-term repercussions. For example, the main character wants to start a school and have everyone learn to read and figure, but the main method of communication in the quarry is this magic that is heart-felt and unlearned. I didn’t see that as fitting well together because it’s possible that all the formal learning will undermine the magical knowledge. The main character is 15 years old, it really seems like her whole village shouldn’t just let her take over. Other people have experience and knowledge and it really seems unlikely that they’d have an open leadership role just going begging for her to fill like that.
It was a good story. It was well told. But I think there were some rough edges as to internal motivations that we just didn’t see.
recommended.
