The Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

I finished the book on CD today called The Princess Academy by Shannon Hale. It was a Newbery Award Honor book in 2006. I actually really like the Newbery Award books because they are usually geared towards the "coming of age" audiences intertwined with deeper themes that can actually be very thought provoking. And some are just fun stories.

Anyway, this book is about a girl named Miri, who lives on Mount Eskel with her older sister and her father. The people of Mount Eskel are quarry diggers and they mine for linder, which is a certain type of valuable rock. The Priests in the Lowlands divine that the Prince's future bride is from the small and very poor town of Mount Eskel. So the King sets up a "Princess Academy" for all the girls ages 12-17 that live in Mount Eskel to learn how to be a Princess. They learn to read and study subjects such as diplomacy, commerce, the art of conversation and various other princess bowing and dancing feats. The girls are all to attend the academy for 1 yr before they are introduced to the Prince at a ball. Sounds familiar, right? Wrong.

You may think that this is a typical Cinderella story but what I thought was going to be a very predictable book actually had a few twists and turned out completely different from how I initially thought it would. Perhaps, that's what made it enjoyable. Some of the underlying themes were that people aren't always what they seem on the outside and that labels we may put on people aren't always fair and aren't always correct. Also, a child can gain so much confidence in herself when she knows that her parent(s) love her.

The unabridged sound recording of this was fun because it was read by a cast instead of just 1 narrator. Overall I give it 4 out of 5 stars.