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A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park
Feb. 14th, 2020 08:55 pmA Princess of Roumania
3/5. First in a fantasy quadrology about a girl raised in New England discovering she is the lost princess of a European power in an alternate universe.
That description makes this sound like the usual sort of thing, and this isn't. Instead, it is opaque, politically dense, strange, and occasionally vicious. My library classified this as YA, which I think is one of those mistakes where someone thinks it's YA because there's a teenager in it. There is a teenager in it – several of them – but the emotional weight of this book actually rests with the villain, who is young and victimized and complicated and truly awful.
Thematically, this is about illusory identities. Characters histories are in doubt, their ages, their sex (or possibly also gender, it isn't clear) in one case. It makes this book slippery and kind of uneasy to read. I appreciated what this is doing, but I'm not sure how invested I am. I also have some concerns about disability in this book -- one of the villains is facially disfigured, and there's a whole thing with an amputee that did not fill me with joy, shall we say.
3/5. First in a fantasy quadrology about a girl raised in New England discovering she is the lost princess of a European power in an alternate universe.
That description makes this sound like the usual sort of thing, and this isn't. Instead, it is opaque, politically dense, strange, and occasionally vicious. My library classified this as YA, which I think is one of those mistakes where someone thinks it's YA because there's a teenager in it. There is a teenager in it – several of them – but the emotional weight of this book actually rests with the villain, who is young and victimized and complicated and truly awful.
Thematically, this is about illusory identities. Characters histories are in doubt, their ages, their sex (or possibly also gender, it isn't clear) in one case. It makes this book slippery and kind of uneasy to read. I appreciated what this is doing, but I'm not sure how invested I am. I also have some concerns about disability in this book -- one of the villains is facially disfigured, and there's a whole thing with an amputee that did not fill me with joy, shall we say.