Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s new novel Princess Ben is a major departure from her earlier works, Dairy Queen and The Off Season. While Dairy Queen and The Off Season focused on the trials of a dairy-farming teenager with dreams of playing high school football in small-town Wisconsin, Princess Ben is an original fairytale about a magical princess. Both stories are thoughtful, well-written coming-of-age tales about socially awkward teenage girls, but their settings and styles are miles apart.

When a series of assassinations makes her the heir to the throne of Montagne, 15-year-old Princess Benevolence’s comfortably self-indulgent life is changed forever. Graceless and immature, Ben is placed in the care of her aunt, who subjects her to endless lectures on royal etiquette. (She also puts the perpetually hungry Ben on a strict diet, because rotund princesses do not get advantageous offers of marriage.) Miserable and furious, Ben happens upon enchanted room in one of the castle’s unused towers, and discovers she has a talent for magic. Hours of work enable her to master a handful of spells, but nothing powerful enough to protect her small mountain kingdom from its powerful and dangerous neighbors.

Princess Ben is not a conventional fairytale. Ben’s aunt is developed well beyond the evil stepmother caricature, the book’s romantic subplot is unusually nuanced (although too-quickly resolved), and the plot focuses on personal responsibility, rather than relying on the classic “pointlessly persecuted heroine” storyline—in a shocking creative twist, many of Ben’s problems are her own fault, rather than the fault of her vicious caretakers.

Not everything about Princess Ben works. Murdock’s faux-historical writing style is irritatingly off-key (“Such musings, I recognize, are more than a trifle insane, for envisioning what might have been has no more connection to our own true reality than a lunatic has to a lemon”), and the book should have been at least a hundred pages longer. Murdock focuses almost exclusively on character development, moving briskly through the story’s setup and action scenes and giving readers little time to appreciate the nooks and crannies of her setting. We’re usually big fans of succinct plotting and a tight focus, but what works for a character-based story set in the real world feels abruptly cut-off in a fantasy novel.

The world is full of books about awkward princesses discovering latent magical powers—stories ranging from Robin McKinley’s classic fantasy The Hero and the Crown to E.D. Baker’s mildly amusing Frog Princess series. I don’t think McKinley needs to worry about Ms. Murdock usurping her place in literary history any time soon, but Princess Ben is a satisfying and original addition to the genre.