The Wide-Awake Princess - Hardcover

Katherine Paterson is the renowned author of BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA and JACOB HAVE I LOVED, Vladimir Vagin is an award-winning designer and illustrator of more than fifty books. Mr. Vagin lives in Middletown Springs, Vermont. both Newbery Medal winners, and numerous other award-winning books. She lives in Barre, Vermont.

A fairy godmothers gift puts a princess on the road to wisdom in this worthy but underdeveloped tale, Vagins (Celia and the Sweet, Sweet Water, 1998, etc.) and Patersons (Preachers Boy, 1999, etc.) third collaboration. Finding everyone in the palace dozing except newborn Princess Miranda, a wrinkled visitor gives the child the gift/curse of clear vision. Continually taking delight in observing the natural world, Miranda grows up with animal friends only, surrounded by oblivious, self-absorbed courtiers and servants. Later, when she ventures out into the countryside after her parents deaths, she finds the common folk ground down by high taxes and low spirits. Her fairy godmother reappears, offering to take back the gift, but Miranda refuses, choosing instead to spend her days working with the peasants and listening to their troubles, ``learning to be queen.'' Eventually, realizing that they will have to take charge of their own destiny, she sends out a musician, a weaver, and a reading teacher to raise morale and to incite a march on the palace that cows the squabbling nobles. For his full-page illustrations Vagin has taken inspiration from late medieval manuscript miniatures, depicting a turreted chateau overlooking patchwork fields, dressing the gentry in elaborate gowns, and bowing the peasants under their labors. But both illustrations and story are surprisingly awkward and events happen much too easily. Young readers are unlikely to understand the problem, the solution, or even just how Miranda differs from her half-awake subjects. (Picture book. 9-11) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.