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A Princess of Roumania

(Princess of Roumania #1)

Paul Park

2.88 · Rating details · 655 ratings · 111 reviews

This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden ...more

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Paperback, 480 pages

Published June 27th 2006 by Tor Fantasy (first published August 1st 2005)

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Jul 01, 2007 Cristin rated it did not like it

Shelves: tripe

I was desperate for a book...My desperation lead me to this dreadful chunk.

The first five pages were actually interesting. There was a whisper of promise that mocked me...and then this book became a train wreck. There were no survivors.

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Aug 24, 2008 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: alternate-history, opinion-doth-differ

Although I can see why this book has such a low rating, it certainly doesn't deserve it. If I came into it with a lot of expectations (since the publishers marketed it as though it were some kind of romantic YA fantasy), I'd rate it low too. It's basically a 400+-page prelude to the next book. Half of the narrative doesn't involve the main characters. The pace is positively glacial. However, the premise and the world of the novel (an alternate Romania) are both really fascinating and they kept t ...more

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Jan 29, 2009 reed rated it it was amazing

Ok, I'm going to try not to rave too much about this book, but it's SO GOOD! It sounds like it's going to be standard issue fantasy -- an adopted girl in a small town starts having weird stuff happen around her and discovers that she is a princess who is destined to fight evil in a magic world.

But everyone in this book acts like a real person, not a fantasy trope. The 'evil' characters don't think they're evil. The heroine is more concerned with her relationship with her parents than fulfilling ...more

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Mar 18, 2008 Shannon rated it it was ok

Shelves: did-not-finish

I actually did not finish this book. I stopped at page 243. I no longer cared enough to spend any more time reading it when I have so many other books to try or great ones to reread. I would give it one star, but I actually would like to know what happens in the end. I just don't want to have to do the work to get there. ...more

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Jun 11, 2008 Donna rated it it was ok

Shelves: fantasy, library

The basic idea for this book is a good one. A regular girl is drawn into an alternate world, and learns that she is a princess and that our world was an elaborate fiction created to hide her. The setting is fantastic, an alternate reality with a drastically different political situation, less technological advancement, and an inexplicable magical system.

It starts out painfully slow, and there are plenty of other parts where the pacing feels off. The concept of the book is "girl gets transported The basic idea for this book is a good one. A regular girl is drawn into an alternate world, and learns that she is a princess and that our world was an elaborate fiction created to hide her. The setting is fantastic, an alternate reality with a drastically different political situation, less technological advancement, and an inexplicable magical system.

It starts out painfully slow, and there are plenty of other parts where the pacing feels off. The concept of the book is "girl gets transported to an alternate reality," but the first fifth of the novel is set in the normal world. Much of that is drama that isn't really relevant to the plot and doesn't even give us that much of an handle on Miranda.

Things pick up for awhile after Miranda and her mysteriously changed friends leave our world behind. But after a quick, desperate struggle, she ends up drifting through encounters with soldiers, hunters, spirits, and savages, most of whom are barely introduced and entirely unexplained before they either die or run like hell after realizing that being involved in this plot is seriously unhealthy. Very little happens.

The bad guys in Roumania have a more interesting story and are better characterized than the heroine and her friends, but their stories are also occasionally muddy.

Park barely touches on how the magic in the world works. It's a key feature of the plot, but I still have no real concept of it's capabilities or limitations. I assume this was intentional, but as a fantasy reader it's very disorienting to not have any understanding of the system's rules. Why can one character cause disease and create illusions half a world away when he can't use it to further his more local goals? Since there's no framework to explain this, the magic seems more like a plot device than a real part of the setting.

The book is written in an interesting style. At times it goes into dreamy prose that, while it has some enchanting moments, is mostly just frustrating. Some of the viewpoint changes are so jarring that it can take several paragraphs to realize that you've jumped between characters.

Good idea, poor execution. I'll probably read the next one just to see what happens to the best of the villains, but maybe Miranda will get more interesting. ...more

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Mar 18, 2008 Myridian rated it did not like it

Shelves: fantasy

This is a coming of age story about a young woman who discovers that, in addition to being an orphan, she is also from another dimension. In fact the most interesting quirk of the novel is the way that Park makes our world the one that isn't real (very Matrixesque). He also spends a significant portion of the book inside the heads of the "villains," increasing our sympathy for them and changing the feel of the conflict between them and our heroine and her friends. Despite all the accolades that ...more

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May 02, 2010 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, sci-fi-and-fantasy

I'm mystified by all of the low ratings on this one. One of the better fantasy books I've read in some time. In fact, the first 3 of the series are quite good. Why Park extended this to 4 books is beyond me. The final book really didn't work for me, which kind of sucks after you invested so much time in the series. I think Park rushed these books, and should have given each of them the layering and care that I found in the first book (and, arguably, the first 3). It could have been one of the gr ...more

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Oct 21, 2007 Terry rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, ya, abandoned

About 120 pages into this book, the plot is still not very compelling and the characters are still fuzzy. After 163 pages I gave up, deciding that I have too many enticing books on my to-be-read shelf to waste my time with characters I don't like. ...more

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Oct 20, 2018 Michael Battaglia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Anyone who's somewhat familiar with 20th century European history will probably have come to the conclusion that, past a certain point, Romania was not a really . . . great place to live. With having a fascist dictator who thought Hitler had the right idea to the Soviets taking over and draining the country dry like a tick with voracious appetite to follow up dictator Nicolae Ceausescu finally forcing people to say "enough of this nonsense" and straight up executing him and his wife via firing s Anyone who's somewhat familiar with 20th century European history will probably have come to the conclusion that, past a certain point, Romania was not a really . . . great place to live. With having a fascist dictator who thought Hitler had the right idea to the Soviets taking over and draining the country dry like a tick with voracious appetite to follow up dictator Nicolae Ceausescu finally forcing people to say "enough of this nonsense" and straight up executing him and his wife via firing squad after a revolution (albeit not before lots of other people were killed first), its like the government was in a contest to see how many possible ways there were to brutally oppress people, with the only prize the opportunity to just keep on doing it.

So of course its the perfect alternate world setting for magical fantasy!

Paul Park is no stranger to things going poorly in fantastic settings . . . the only book I was of his "Coelestis", dealt with colonialism and didn't have the most upbeat of endings if I recall correctly. I've read nothing else of his since, although years ago I spotted this when it came out and thought it looked interesting. Since the cover copy mentions that the story continues in "The Tourmaline" I waited until I had that as well and then apparently didn't notice that the story keeps going for two more books which I don't seem to have and will eventually get around to fixing, if not for no other reason than finishing what I start.

The premise is . . . not exactly simple. Teenage Miranda was adopted when she was very young and has only scattered memories of her life before coming to Massachusetts with her new parents. She's a fairly typical teenager, hanging out with her best friend Andromeda and sort of hanging out with socially awkward and one handed classmate Peter Gross. But she keeps getting hints that she wasn't a typical baby and in another placed called Roumania the Baroness Ceausescu is going forth with complicated plans to, ah . . . well, I'm not exactly sure what her plans are.

As you can probably figure out, the magical world of "Roumania" is Miranda's real home and its not too long before she gets summoned back there with her two friends so they can spend a good portion of time being very confused and running for their lives, all the while receiving various hints on what they should be doing when people aren't trying to shoot and/or capture them.

Its a bit of a strange novel, an attempt to give us a fantasy world where magic isn't blatant, without wizards and elves and all the other genre trappings. Where magic does exist its fairly subtle and ranges from actual magical spells to speaking with the dead to strange creatures or weird dream worlds. In fact, if you were skimming the proceedings you might not even realize its supposed to be a fantasy book at all. Instead, at times it almost works better as a straight alternate history, with Roumania as a major European power in a world where England doesn't seem to exist (it appears to be underwater) and Germany is their main opposition. In fact, early on the prospect of some good old fashioned 19th century political maneuvering between the elector of Germany and the Baroness with Miranda as the pawn in between them holds more potential interest than the idea of some kind of background magical war erupting, as Miranda's real aunt appears to be trying to get her in a position to do something (and her mother is imprisoned in Germany) that will probably involve her becoming a symbol to everyone, or something.

Unfortunately, despite having lots of elements of things I like in novels it just doesn't hang together for some reason. Early on when we don't know what's going on we're in the same boat as Miranda and her crew and that feels right, as she's walking into a fight that started before she was born and she can't play catch up because everyone she meets knows a different piece of the whole story. But as the book goes on the stakes don't become any clearer. The baroness and the elector appear to be engaging in some kind of high level game (and the elector is doing his own dance with the government, who appears ready to invade) but the end result isn't clear at all and so after a while you're not entirely sure what the fuss is about.

Not knowing what the rules are with magic doesn't help either . . . magic appears so rarely that its hard to tell what's magical and what's just plain weirdness. Park does weirdness well but when nothing is explained properly there's only so much "going with it" you can manage. Having Miranda bring her two friends is fine, but then people start referring to her two friends by the names of comrades of her fathers and then one of her friends turns into a dog . . . its supposed to be elusive and mysterious but it winds up being a bunch of confused people remaining confused.

Perhaps the most off-putting aspect of the novel is how . . . flat it feels. Park is a good writer and when things get subtly weird his prose can elevate scenes to a dreamlike state but for the most part the book feels trapped in a grey haze, not so much dreamlike as drearily narcotic. Everyone feels like they're floundering around and scenes often just sit there, never springing to life. Everyone in the book feels like they're going through the motions without any verve and it puts a weird distance between you and the characters, like you're seeing them under soundproofed glass. The pace never seems to rise above "languid" and so you keep reading hoping for some definite direction to approach. I'm not looking for a mysterious wizard to give her some jewelry to toss into a volcano but after several hundred pages I'd like to feel like the characters are working toward a concrete goal other than pure survival.

And as usual with this kind of publishing strategy, the book doesn't properly end when its supposed to, basically finding a stopping point so you can pick it up in the next volume . . . but it doesn't feel like a series where each novel has its own B-plot that ties into the overarching A-plot as much as this was just the point where the publisher wanted to cut it off. Call me old fashioned but there's something to be said for giving a reader an individual reading experience between the covers, with some cliffhangers to entice them to grab the next volume. Here, they're just hoping you'll be intrigued enough to keep going but unless you're locked into this book's vibe I wouldn't take that as a given. ...more

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Apr 23, 2009 Amanda rated it it was amazing

this series is actually very good, it's not some romance type fantasy filled with teenage angst. I really hate that genre(sorry, romance lovers) I don't think he should have named the first book this though, because that's what i thought it was from the title and the cover pic. Honestly, I think it got such low reviews on here because many of the people who picked it up to read thought they were picking up a romance/fantasy and it is in now way that. It is definitely not a princessy (like the ti ...more

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Feb 14, 2017 Melyssa rated it did not like it

Shelves: fantasy-urban

I started reading this once and ended up putting it down. I just tried it again because the premise is an interesting one. Sadly, this time around I had to force myself to finish it.

This is a very frustrating book. First of all (major pet peeve here) there is nothing anywhere on my copy that indicates it is the first of a series. Not until you reach the end where nothing is resolved and there is a preview of the next book do you get that information. I tend to buy full series all at once rather ...more

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Feb 22, 2008 Sabine rated it it was ok

Recommended to Sabine by: Orson Scott Card's review page

First let me be clear that my rating books has changed since I first joined good reads. It is now only those books that I would read again and again or how a powerful impact in my life that will get five stars. 3 is a book I liked, but probably not read again. This book falls somewhere between a two and a three. There were parts of it that I loved. When it comes to the imagination of the author I was truly blown away but his inventiveness and story ideas. But by the time I had 100 pages left I f ...more

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Apr 11, 2008 Woodge rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

This is the first book in a new trilogy and the title character is a young woman named Miranda Popescu, a girl in her teens living in western Massachusetts. But all that's about to change as she soon learns that she's a princess from an alternate world where Roumania is one of Europe's power players in the 19th century. She and two of her friends find themselves back in this world and somewhat changed in the process. There's political intrigue and interesting characters doing weird things. There ...more

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Apr 14, 2007 Debbie rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Those who like melodramatic, purple prose.

Shelves: fantasy, dead-tree, 2006

It took me a while to get into this book. I had received a free advance copy of the mass market copy of this book at a SF convention and with a lack of anything to do during some downtime, started reading. Honestly, the only reason I finished the first one hundred pages was because someone I knew was really enjoying it. After the hundred-page mark, the story picked up and I didn't tend notice the somewhat verbose writing style as much. I don't think I'll pick up the sequel, though. This book is ...more

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Oct 26, 2008 sarah t rated it it was ok

I could barely make myself finish this book. It was a gift from my pop, who bought it based on a newspaper review suggesting that this book was like Harry Potter. Yikes. It was not like Harry Potter - it was not easy to read, or funny, or good, or anthing. It was confusing - I felt like whole chapters must have been missing because I couldn't always follow the plot. Or else maybe I was such a sloppy reader that I really missed whole major sequences. I'm not sure, but man, don't read this. ...more

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Jan 15, 2008 Leigh rated it it was ok

Hard to get into. Too many characters with too little invested in them, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was working for whom. It's an intriguing idea, but tries to hard to be highbrow and fails at making itself understandable enough to be enjoyable. ...more

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Nov 17, 2008 Moira rated it did not like it

Good premise for the story - I love a good alternate universe! Unfortunately, the book was very hard to follow and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. I didn't bother reading the other books in the series. Maybe I'm too old to be reading about disaffected teenagers........ ...more

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Feb 20, 2021 Jim Grimsley rated it it was ok

I enjoyed the beginning of this book, the modeling of the world, the writing, and the structure; I enjoyed so many parts of the book at that point that I wondered why I did not enjoy the book itself more. The problem with so much of literature is that what works in one book gets repeated so many times in other books that it all wears out. This book feels so much like the introduction to a series that it fails for that very reason, in my view. It is like one long preface. The world of Miranda and ...more

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Jun 20, 2017 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: novels, speculative-fiction

Can't recall where I heard about this book, or what I heard that was compelling enough for me to seek it out. In any event, I did so, and by about halfway through, I strongly considered not finishing it. Had I realized it was the first in a quartet, I definitely would have stopped, because I basically slogged through 180 pages just to see how it would end, and it's basically a setup for future books.

The premise is that there's an adopted teenage girl in present-day Massachusetts who turns out to ...more

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Dec 08, 2018 Kelly McCubbin rated it really liked it

Paul Park is one of those writers that you didn't realize you had been looking for until you find him.

Much is made of the autobiographical accents of these books, but what I find most fascinating is his turning of the standard "hero's journey" narrative on its head. To give too much away is to deny some of the vertiginous joy of the narrative, so I won't say much other than, what happens when your hero refuses to play by the rules of the formal narrative construct you've put her in?
Make no mista ...more

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Jan 09, 2020 Stephanie rated it did not like it

Shelves: unfinished

Unfortunately, I think I am shelving this book. It was a recommendation from a friend, so I really wanted to give it a shot, however, I found myself not reading at all as I subconsciously avoided this book.

I would say that the story intrigued me and I may need to find a summary of the book to know how it ends, but it was the author's writing style that was not my jam. I often found myself confused as we swapped between characters/time very suddenly and I, personally, prefer longer background de ...more

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Feb 05, 2017 Annie rated it liked it

Shelves: sf-f

I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. It is an interesting concept, a fascinating world, and beautifully written. However, the main character, Miranda, was a disappointment. She does nothing to influence her own fate. She follows along, going where she is pulled and tugged. Near the end, when she does make a somewhat important decision, it seems half-hearted. I found the other characters more interesting, more motivated, and more actionable. Perhaps I'll read the other books in th ...more

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Sep 30, 2017 Lana rated it it was ok

Shelves: gave-away, read2017

Many people I know really love this book, people who's taste in books I usually like, so I wish I liked this also. But the truth is, I'm still not sure what I read (or why I read it). I never got it - I never distinguished the plot, or characters. I just never understood what I was reading. Which is pretty unusual for me. ...more

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Aug 22, 2020 Lucy Takeda rated it did not like it

I started this once before, and set it aside because I had a more interesting library book. This time I did finish; I’m not sure why. The characters weren’t terribly interesting. The time/location jumps were mostly annoying. I got really tired of reading about folks gripping assorted animal’s fur. I definitely won’t be looking for the rest of the series.

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Nov 04, 2018 Cris rated it did not like it

Shelves: fantasy, book-club-selection

I found the non-linear storytelling to be disjointed, the characters uninteresting and the plot confusing. Overall, I was bored.

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May 17, 2020 Sue Chant rated it liked it

Shelves: sff-tiptree-award, feminist-fiction, sff-fantasy

Tiptree shortlist 2008. A bit uneven but enjoyed it more than I expected. A nicely eerie/dream-logic quality to some of it.

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Sep 25, 2020 Caitlin H rated it did not like it

Shelves: dnf

DNF'd and long since donated to somewhere (as in years ago; doing this now is just housekeeping).

The writing was not done well. Who edited this book? ...more

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Jan 12, 2021 Gary Milczarek rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Spell binding

Wow. Spell binding. And I didn't think I even liked fantasy. I chose this after reading a review by John Crowley, and I am not disappointed. ...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Simon Mcleish rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Originally published on my blog here in April 2007.

One author who is mentioned several times in the quotations printed on the back of A Princess of Roumania is Philip Pullman. Now, anyone who has read my reviews of the His Dark Materials trilogy will know that Pullman is an author I think massively overrated, and so I found this somewhat off-putting. The praise I had read for A Princess of Roumania in the end persuaded me to give it a try, and I am glad that I did. While I can understand the com Originally published on my blog here in April 2007.

One author who is mentioned several times in the quotations printed on the back of A Princess of Roumania is Philip Pullman. Now, anyone who has read my reviews of the His Dark Materials trilogy will know that Pullman is an author I think massively overrated, and so I found this somewhat off-putting. The praise I had read for A Princess of Roumania in the end persuaded me to give it a try, and I am glad that I did. While I can understand the comparison to Pullman, Park has more interesting ideas, a more atmospheric setting, and, above all, the ability to write convincing characters; while many consider His Dark Materials a classic, A Princess of Roumania is much more deserving of the label.

The story is simple; in fact, it is the ultimate fantasy cliché: the lost heir. Park mixes it with alternative universes, also not especially new: hiding the lost heir in our world is something I planned to use in an abandoned novel I began in 1991, among other uses of the idea. The first slightly unusual aspect to A Princess of Roumania is that our world is the fictional one, magically created solely to hide the princess Miranda from her family's enemies. Park's Roumania is a great power in decline, threatened principally by the Germans; her father was wrongfully accused of betraying Roumania to them twenty years earlier, an event which led to the elevation of one of the Roumanian generals as the power behind the throne. The baby Miranda was hidden by her aunt, an adept of magic, with the aid of a pair of books: each describing the history of a world, one real and one fictional; when both books are destroyed, the spell is broken and Miranda is returned to the "real" world. An odd quirk means she's fifteen even though twenty years have passed: this is not explained (though of course future novels in the series may do so) and suggests that the flow of time in magical worlds is different from that in the real world, an idea which goes back to folk stories where people kidnapped by fairies find that after a single night everyone they knew is dead of old age.

The pace is slow; the point of the novel being to establish the characters and set the stage for their interactions. Quite a lot does actually happen - it just feels relaxed to read it. Park doesn't quite manage the (surely impossible) task of persuading the reader that his Roumania is more real than the world we live in, but he comes closer than a lot of writers. It is the characters which really excel. This makes Park's work reminiscent in truth of one of the other authors to whom he is compared on the back of A Princess of Roumania, John Crowley, who is one of my favourite authors of all. Involving, rather than exciting, is the order of the day; and A Princess of Roumania is guaranteed a place on my reads of the year. ...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Jenn rated it it was ok

Shelves: fantasy, sci-fi, creepy-spooky-goosebumps, magic-occult-witches, people-be-crazy, alternate-reality, why-did-i-torture-myself

I read this book and also got 1/2 through the next one. I cannot for the life of me tell you what was really going on. I remember and understood bits and pieces and from those, I liked the premise. The plot was just too confusing to really get a sense of what everyone was doing and what their motives were.

The story is about a girl who was sent to another dimension to be raised because she was the daughter of royalty that was supposedly killed. Her dimension is one where Roumania is basically al ...more

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About Paul Park

Paul Park

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Paul Park (born 1954) is an American science fiction author and fantasy author. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children. He also teaches a Reading and Writing Science Fiction course at Williams College. He has also taught several times at the Clarion West Writing Workshop.

Park appeared on the American science fiction scene in 1987 and quickly established himself ...more