Once on a dark winter day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father, and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.
Sara Crewe is a little girl of seven when her father brings her back to England to go to boarding school. Her rich young father loves her dearly and lavishes his Princess Sara with anything and everything a little girl could want before he returns to India. When her father loses all his fortune and dies in India, Sara is left an orphan at the mercy of Miss Minchin, her teacher and guardian at the boarding school. Miss Minchin, who is not generally disposed to mercy, and particularly not toward Sara, confiscates all her belongings and banishes her to the right hand attic to live as a servant until she can become a teacher in the school.
With the company of Becky the scullery maid, her precious doll Emily, and two students who still revere her as Princess Sara, Sara Crewe is comforted in her misery until one day everything flips inside out and she finds that even cramped attics are not susceptible to magic.
It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.
When I was eight or nine years old, I read A Little Princess for the first time. I always would go back and reread chapter fifteen, which is when Sara’s attic is transformed by “the magic.” However, my copy of A Little Princess was on E-Reader which was remarkably tricky to charge, and which was out of commission for years. Just a few months ago, I finally bought a beautiful hardcover copy of my own and I’ve fallen even more in love with it. I think that I can firmly say that A Little Princess is my all-time favorite read. It is so nostalgic to me and is the perfect comfort read. I can wholeheartedly recommend it without any misgivings!
Moral Value: 4.5
Artistic Value: 5
Overall Value: 4.75
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