I read this to my 7-year-old daughter over several bedtimes. I thought it was pretty average to be honest. And for age group it is probably for 10-year-olds-up with long chapters, a girl obsessed by fashion in there, plus some blood and guns towards the end.
The story sees orphan Sophie Smith at a boarding school with her two mates, the clever Marianne, and the fashion-conscious Delphine. Sophie dreams of Russia, “a land of palaces and poetry”, of winter forests and of her late dad.
Lo-and–behold she, and her two friends, get picked to go on a school trip to Russia where they are dispatched onto a train, thrown off at a deserted train station, before they are taken to the dilapidated Volkonsky Winter Palace, “a diamond in the snow, a palace of dreams, so remote it has been forgotten with the noble Volkonskys erased from the history books.”. Here she meets the Princess, who is not all she seems with her “sudden flames of anger, the cold grey eyes that had looked so calculating.”
Things in the novel don’t really take off though until about two thirds in when General Grigor arrives seeking his investment back from the Princess who was meant to find the Volkonsky diamonds.
To get the Russian atmosphere in the book a few Russian words are thrown in (e.g. nyet, babushka), although all the characters, including the Russian children servants, speak English. There are also some wolves and lots of snow, talk of the Russian Revolution and the Tsars.
There is a little bit of magic in there too with vozoks, a “midnight picnic on a frozen lake” and “skating by twilight” but the book was quite predictable and average for me.
Publication date: 4 Oct 2012
Amazon UK link: The Wolf Princess
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