Paul Park // Tor // Out Now

In a Nutshell: Girl adopted from a Romanian orphanage by American parents is, in fact, a Princess of an alternate, magical ‘Roumania’ where she is sought after by rival conjurers as the key to world domination.

Review: As a first observation, to say that A Princess of Roumania isn’t exactly built on the most original or promising of premises is pretty much on the money. Adopted as a baby from one of Romania’s hellish, post-Ceauşescu orphanages, Miranda is a girl who has always felt somewhat detached from her adoptive, American parents, somewhat foreign to her comfortable Massachusetts upbringing. With just a handful of relics brought from Romania to tell her of her past - an old book she can’t read with a handwritten note in the front, some old jewellery, a few ancient coins - she constructs a fairy-tale of a desperate aunt putting her on the train to a place of safety, of magical castles in the mountains and of another, secret past…But guess what? It’s true - Miranda really is a princess, and soon off she’s off on a magical adventure with her friends to discover the truth about her past.

It’s a fantasy trope so well worn as to risk predictability, but in truth this is a tale told in splendidly unique fashion, full of imagination and unassumingly intelligent. The place of Miranda’s birth is in fact an alternate world closely resembling, though quite intriguingly different from, so many eras of our own past, where Roumania sits as one of Europe’s great powers, heir to a Roman Empire which seemingly escaped such a catastrophic demise as faced by that of our own world, though elsewhere resembling nothing quite so much as the 18th and 19th Century heydays of Europe’s colonial powers.

The similarities and contrasts, both, with our own world are astute and subtle, perhaps in some ways a little too subtle, and the nature of this Roumania takes some time to become apparent in what is actually a rather long book. Not without its slow moments, A Princess of Roumania does, however, enchant throughout. With a further two volumes to follow in the series, this isn’t quite the light undertaking it might first appear from its simple charms and familiar, fairytale premise - but it is well worth the effort.

This review originally appeared in issue 5 of Death Ray magazine.