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The Ruby Princess Sees a Ghost

Jewel Kingdom Series

The Ruby Princess Sees a Ghost by Jahnna N. Malcolm, 1997.

Princess Roxanne lives in the Ruby Palace in the Red Mountains, and each of her sisters live in and rule over a different part of the Jewel Kingdom. The sisters visit each other from time to time, but Princess Roxanne has noticed that her sisters seem reluctant to visit the Ruby Palace. She finds out why the first time her sisters come to visit her.

Princess Sabrina tells her that she saw someone in white waving from a tower as she approached the Ruby Palace, but Roxanne knows it wasn’t her and there shouldn’t have been anyone in the tower. That’s when her sisters tell her that there are rumors that the Ruby Palace is haunted.

Roxanne says that she’s never noticed anything strange about the Ruby Palace that would make her think it was haunted. But, almost immediately, strange things begin to happen. The cook sees a ghost in the kitchen. A picture falls off the wall, and the princesses hear mysterious laughter.

To Roxanne’s dismay, her sisters are all too scared to continue their visit. After the other princesses leave, Roxanne hears the ghost threatening to come get her, but as she tries to get away, she picks up a ring dropped by the ghost.

Roxanne knows that she has to get to the bottom of this mysterious haunting or she’ll never feel comfortable in the Ruby Palace again. Fortunately, Sabrina decides to return to the Ruby Palace to help her, and she recognizes the crest on the ghosts’ ring as the crest of Lord Bleak, their arch-enemy. Roxanne and Sabrina also discover a hidden door and secret passage in the Ruby Palace. Is Lord Bleak responsible for this haunting? Did he somehow send the ghost, or is this ghost more than just a ghost?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I thought this was a cute story. I didn’t read this series when I was a kid, although I saw books for sale. This is the first book in the series I read, and fortunately, it provides enough backstory to explain who Lord Bleak is and why he might be staging a haunting in the Ruby Palace. It’s a pretty easy read, just a short chapter book, and I think the mystery is probably not too difficult to figure out if you already know the backstory of the series and who Lord Bleak is. Still, I think a young child would still enjoy the suspense and atmosphere of the story and how the princesses turn the tables on the fake “ghost.” There is also a twist at the end of the story where there is actually a ghost who haunts the Ruby Palace, but it’s not the one they think, and she’s on Roxanne’s side.

I think the setting is the most fun part of the Jewel Kingdom stories. The Jewel Kingdom is divided up into different regions, each with its own terrain and magical creatures. Each princess rules over a region that fits her personality. The Ruby Palace is described as being made of stone and rather drafty and mysterious compared to the other princesses’ palaces, but Roxanne loves it.

Posted on by TracyC

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

The Twelve Dancing Princesses retold and illustrated by Ruth Sanderson, 1990.

This is a retelling of the classic German fairy tale collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. There are various retellings of this story, some changing the number of princesses and some giving the characters different names. This one is actually closer to the Andrew Lang version from The Red Fairy Book, published in 1890.

A king with twelve daughters has a strange mystery to solve. All twelve of his daughters sleep in the same room every night. The door to their room is always locked, but every morning, the girls’ shoes are completely worn out, like they’ve been dancing all night. The girls claim that all they do at night is sleep, but that doesn’t explain what happened to their shoes.

The king is confused and troubled by this odd mystery, so he promises the hand of one of his daughters in marriage to the man who can solve the mystery. A series of princes attempt to solve the mystery by sleeping in a room next to the princesses, but in the morning, each of the princes has mysteriously disappeared and the princesses’ shoes are still worn out.

With the mystery getting more mysterious and more urgent, with the princes’ disappearances, a commoner named Michael decides that he wants to try to solve the mystery. A woman Michael meets recommends that he take a job as a gardener’s helper at the castle and see if he can spot something that would give him a hint. The mysterious woman gives Michael a cloak that will make him invisible so that he can follow the princesses and see what they do.

Michael first meets the princesses when the gardener sends him to give a bouquet of flowers to each of them. He catches the attention of the youngest princess, Lina. Lina’s sisters tease her about admiring a simple garden boy, but Michael also likes Lina.

Because he is a commoner, Michael doesn’t think that he can go the king directly and ask to investigate the mystery of the princesses, so he decides to use his magic cloak to spy on them secretly. When he’s invisible, he slip into their room before the princesses are locked in for the night and hides. After everyone thinks that the princesses have gone to bed, they get dressed as if they’re going to a dance, putting on their new dancing shoes. The eldest princess opens a special trap door in the floor, and they all leave secretly, with Michael following them.

Michael follows the princesses through magical woods to a lake where the captive, now enchanted, princes wait to take the princesses to a magical palace in boats shaped like swans. There, the princesses dance with the princes all night, wearing their shoes to pieces.

Lina suspects that someone followed them because Michael accidentally stepped on her skirt a couple of times, and Michael confirms her suspicion when he places a branch from the magical woods into her bouquet of flowers. At first, Lina tries to bribe Michael into keeping their secret by offering him money, but he refuses. She asks him if he plans to tell the king and collect his reward by marrying one of the princesses, but Michael says he won’t. Lina tries to ask him why, but he doesn’t want to answer. The truth is that Michael loves Lina and doesn’t want to get her into trouble or force her to marry him if she doesn’t return his affections.

Eventually, Lina tells her eldest sister, the one who is controlling all of the magic behind their escapades, about Michael and what he knows. Lina’s sisters want to have Michael thrown in the dungeon to keep him quiet, but Lina is horrified and says that if they do that, she’ll tell their father the truth herself. Instead, they decide to openly invite him to their next dance and offer him the magical drink that would enchant him like they did with all of the other princes. Michael overhears their plan and decides that he will see if Lina really loves him. If can’t appeal to her heart, he’ll drink the drink and be enchanted.

When Lina prevents Michael from drinking the enchanted drink at the dance because she loves him and can’t stand to see him turned into a mindless magical slave, the spell is broken on all of the other princes. They all return to the castle, and the magical palace crumbles behind them. When they reveal the truth to the king, he makes Michael the heir to the kingdom with Lina as his wife.

I’ve heard many different versions of this story before, but there are always so many unanswered questions. Just how did the eldest princess come up with this whole magical dancing scheme in the first place? Where did she even learn to do magic? How come the princesses are never tired even though they dance every night instead of sleeping? (Well, I guess that could just be magic because magic can fill many plot holes.) Why did the king just keep giving the girls new dancing shoes when they kept wearing them out every night? My parents would have just stopped giving me things that I repeatedly broke, telling me that I can’t have new stuff if I can’t take care of the old. They’d probably say something like, “I don’t know what you’re doing with those shoes every night, but whatever it is, you’re not going to do it anymore because you won’t have them.” But, fairy tale characters just aren’t that practical, and if they were, the story would have ended much sooner. In fact, why didn’t the king himself just sit up for one night with his daughters and see for himself what they did or split them up and put them in different rooms of his castle to put an end to their hijinks? Just what is the king going to do with the eldest princess, now that he knows that she’s some kind of witch or enchantress? Did her powers break completely when Michael broke her spell? Also, what was the deal with the mysterious woman Michael met on the road, who gave him the invisibility cloak? How did she figure into this, or was she just some random, magical being or enchantress who, coincidentally, just happened to have a magical cloak that she could spare? The story doesn’t really say.

I love the pictures in this book because they are beautiful and detailed, but the art style is a little unusual. Instead of having every picture appear in its entirety on a page, some pictures wrap around to the next page, either giving a hint of what’s coming or a taste of what was on the previous page. Sometimes, I found myself wanting to see the whole picture at once, but I can see how the illustrator was trying to make scenes in the story kind of flow into each other.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

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Princess Tales

Princess Tales edited by Nora Kramer, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, 1971.

This is a collection of princess stories by various authors, including retellings of some classic fairy tales, some or all of which were printed in other locations before being included in this collection.  Although I have encountered some of these stories before this collection, I liked the illustrations in this book because I like Barbara Cooney’s work.

Stories in the Book:

The Practical Princess by Jay Williams (1969) – I know this story from the story collection that is named after it, but it did appear in other printings before either of these.  Princess Bedelia was given the gift of common sense as a baby, and she uses her practicality to rid her kingdom of a dragon and save herself from marriage to an evil sorcerer.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Virginia Haviland (1959) – A retelling of the classic fairy tale.  A French kingdom with twelve beautiful princesses is mystified by how the princesses’ shoes are always worn through every morning even though the door to their room is locked every night when they go to bed.  What are the princesses doing every night that ruins their shoes, and how are they doing it?  Michel, a young cowherd who has recently taken a gardening job at the castle and who has fallen in love with the youngest of the twelve princesses, discovers the answer.  When her sisters want to enchant Michel, as they have others who have discovered their secret to keep them from telling, Princess Lina needs to decide if she loves Michel as much as he loves her.

The Princess and the Vagabone by Ruth Sawyer (1942) – A beautiful but bad-tempered Irish princess learns a lesson in kindness when her father gets fed up with the way she treats her suitors.  All of her life, the princess has dealt out criticism and insults to everyone, when she sees a suitor with whom she can find no fault, she doesn’t know what to do (never having practiced kindness or spoken nicely to anyone) and gets angry, hitting him and crying as she runs from the room.  Her father, disgusted with her impossible behavior, tells her that he’s had enough, and since she has rejected all the royal suitors, he will force her to marry the next vagabone (vagabond) who comes begging at the castle.  As the wife of a vagabond, the princess learns to face hardships she has never experienced before, sees for the first time how much kindness from another person can really mean, and notes positive points about others for the first time, enjoying the ragged vagabone’s song.  But, there is still one more surprise when the vagabone turns out to be the perfect suitor the princess thought that she had rejected.

Melisande by E. Nesbit – A king and queen want to avoid the usual messes and curses that often result from holding a christening party for a new princess and forgetting to invite one of the fairies, so they decide that, for their daughter Melisande, they will simply hold an informal christening with no party.  However, all of the fairies get mad about this and come to give curses to the princess.  Fortunately, the king points out logically that, according to tradition, only one forgotten fairy can offer a bad curse to a princess after being left out of a christening party.  Fairies are held to certain rules and can vanish for breaking them, so since the first fairy already cursed the princess with baldness, the others simply agree to count themselves are party guests and leave.  Princess Melisande spends her childhood being bald, but the king offers her a fairy wish that he had been saving for something special so that she can wish for hair.  However, Melisande foolishly wishes for her hair to grow exceedingly fast and even faster when cut.  It’s far too much hair for her, even though people try to help her find uses for it, like weaving it into clothes and stuffing pillows with it.  As usual in these cases, the king offers Melisande’s hand in marriage to the prince who can help her to solve her problem.  At first, Prince Florizel thinks he’s found the solution when, instead of cutting the princess’s hair from her, he cuts her from her hair.  However, that has the unintended side effect of making the princess grow suddenly tall!  What will Prince Florizel do to get the princess and her hair to balance?  (At one point, this story references Alice in Wonderland.)

The Handkerchief by Robert Gilstrap and Irene Estabrook (1958) – At first, Zakia is not happy when her father, the Grand Vizier of Morocco accepts the sultan’s offer to marry her on her behalf. She doesn’t think that it’s fair for him to order her to marry anyone, and she doesn’t love the sultan. In response, she imposes a requirement on the marriage, that the sultan must learn a trade in case he loses his throne and has to earn a living. To the vizier’s surprise, the sultan thinks that sounds like a clever request, and the sultan learns the art of weaving. He enjoys it, and he makes a beautiful handkerchief for Zakia as a wedding present. Zakia appreciates the gift and marries him. The sultan’s ability as a weaver later saves him when he is in a desperate situation.

The Blackbird’s Song by Barbara Leonie Picard (1964) – An artist paints an unflattering picture of the king and is thrown into prison. However, the princess’s pet blackbird sings to him of the princess’s beauty and kindness, and he is able to paint a marvelous portrait of her without having seen her himself. When the princess falls in love with the artist, her blackbird and its friends help them to make their escape from her father.

Ricky-of-the-Tuft by Polly Curren (1963) – A prince is born ugly, and his mother is worried, but a fairy gives him the gift of wit and intelligence, with the ability to give that gift to someone he loves. In another kingdom, a queen has two daughters. The eldest is beautiful and the youngest is plain. However, a fairy says that the plain girl will be bright and intelligent, and people who talk to her will forget what she looks like. The beautiful girl is less fortunate because she is not intelligent. People will enjoy looking at her, but they will quickly tire of her because she does not speak intelligently and has nothing to say. To compensate the beautiful girl, the fairy says that she will be able to make the person she loves beautiful as well. When the ugly prince, Rick-of-the-Tuft, meets the beautiful princess and falls in love with her, the two of them are able to use their gifts to help each other. The story is based on a Perrault fairy tale.

The Son of the Baker of Barra by Sorche Nic Leodhas (1968) – The baker’s son, Ian Beg, is a nice boy, and sometimes a little too nice. When his father sends him to take a cake to the princess, he is stopped by old women who ask him for a taste of the cake, and he cannot refuse them. However, it turns out to be a fortunate thing. The old women are actually fairy folk, and not only do they handsomely compensate him for the cake that they eat, but they also help him when the princess falls in love with him and the king tries to get rid of him by sending him off to find a castle of his own. The king doesn’t expect that Ian Beg will be able to find a castle and supply the kind of lifestyle that a princess needs, but he doesn’t know that Ian Beg has help.

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Dealing with Dragons

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede, 1990.

This is the first book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles.  The fun thing about this series is that it parodies many popular fairy tales and their tropes.  Some of the books in the series also take the form of fantasy mysteries with some puzzle or nefarious happenings that the characters have to figure out.

From when she was a young child, Princess Cimorene of Linderwall has been bored with the kind of life that is expected from ordinary princesses.  Unlike her six older sisters, Cimorene doesn’t have golden curls.  She has black hair, and she’s way too tall for a cute little princess.  She’s also very stubborn.  When Cimorene gets bored of the usual princess lessons involving dancing, embroidery, and etiquette, she pushes other people in the castle into giving her different types of lessons.  First, she convinces the armsmaster to give her fencing lessons.  Then, she gets the court magician to give her magic lessons.  She also arranges Latin lessons, cooking lessons, economics lessons, juggling lessons, and so forth.  Each time her parents find out about her unusual lessons, they put a stop to them because none of the subjects that Cimorene finds interesting are “proper” for a princess to study. 

When Cimorene’s parents try to arrange for her to marry a prince that she doesn’t like, she finally decides that enough is enough.  Cimorene meets a talking frog in the castle pond, and after talking over her problem with him and saying that she’d rather be eaten by a dragon than marry the prince, the frog recommends that she run away.  He even gives her directions on where to go after she leaves the castle.  Not having any other plan, Cimorene takes his advice . . . and ends up at a dragon’s lair.

It works out for the best, though.  Rather than being eaten, Cimorene asks the dragons in the lair if they are in need of a princess.  She isn’t quite sure what princesses who are taken captive by dragons do, but she can cook (as part of her earlier cooking lessons) and do other chores.  Although one of the dragons, Woraug, wants to just eat her, the dragon called Kazul takes her on as her princess.

Cimorene finds it interesting being a dragon’s princess.  She cooks for Kazul and also helps to organize her treasure hoard and library.  As is expected when word gets out that Cimorene is a dragon’s princess, knights come to try to rescue her.  They are shocked when Cimorene turns them away, and it takes awhile before Cimorene is able to convince them that she’s really happy with the dragons and doesn’t want to be rescued.

Cimorene even makes new friends.  Morwen, a witch friend of Kazul’s, comes to visit and teaches Cimorene more about magic.  Morwen is also very practical and suggests putting up a sign (something like “Road Washed Out”) to discourage knights from approaching Kazul’s lair.  It is while Cimorene is putting out the sign that she means the wizard Zemenar.  His presence in the area is suspicious because wizards and dragons do not get along.  Wizards do not use their own magic but use their staffs to soak up magic from magical places or magical beings – like dragons.  When wizards take magic from dragons, they actually take part of their essence, and give them a reaction that’s similar to allergies.  Zemenar is also head of the Society of Wizards, so it’s doubly suspicious if he’s been hanging around a dragon’s cave.  When Cimorene tells Kazul and her friends about seeing him, they become concerned, wondering what he’s after.

Cimorene also meets other princesses who are the captives of other dragons: Keredwel, Hallanna, and Alianora.  At first, they also have trouble believing that Cimorene actually volunteered to be a dragon’s princess and that she likes it.  Cimorene doesn’t like the arrogant attitudes of Keredwel and Hallanna, but Alianora is pleasant, and the two of them become friends.  Alianora tells Cimorene that, although she was taken captive by Woraug, her family basically set her up for it.  Like Cimorene, she was under a lot of pressure to do the things that everyone expects of fairy tale princesses, but she wasn’t much good at them, and things never turned out as one might expect.  The wicked fairy who came to Alianora’s christening when she was a baby didn’t curse her; she just enjoyed the party and had a wonderful time.  Alianora also didn’t prick her finger on the spinning wheel that her busy-body aunt gave her, and when she tried to spin straw into gold, she got linen thread instead.  When various fairy tale schemes failed to work for Alianora, her interfering aunt arranged for her to visit a village, knowing that Woraug was going to ravage it.  As Morwen noted, princesses who are taken captive by dragons and then rescued can expect to make good marriages.  Although being abducted by a dragon was a shock, Alianora says it’s not so bad; Woraug mostly ignores her since she doesn’t know how to cook, and it’s a relief for her to get away from her nagging aunt.  The only downside is that the other, more conventional princesses are really annoying.  Alianora and Cimorene bond over their unconventional lives as fairy tale princesses.  Cimorene gets the idea to send some of her knights and princes to go rescue Keredwel, thus taking care of two problems at once.  Alianora also helps Cimorene with her efforts to find a fire-proofing spell to protect the princesses from accidental burning from the dragons, and later becomes her ally when things get more serious.

Zemenar returns to Kazul’s cave and, while Cimorene tries to subtly pump him for information, he sneaks a look at a book about the history of dragons.  He seems to be interested in the section about how they settled in the Mountains of Morning, how they chose their king, and the Caves of Fire and Night, where they found the special stone that they use to choose their king.

Then, the king of the dragons is murdered, poisoned by dragonsbane.  The wizards have a confederate among the dragons themselves, and they want something that only the king of the dragons can give them.

By the time the murder is committed, Cimorene and Kazul have a pretty good idea of who the conspirator among the dragons is.  The wizards think that they’ve found a way to rig the ceremony for choosing a new king so that the dragon who supports them will win, giving them what they really want.  However, Cimorene foils their plan with the help of her friends.  The mystery/conspiracy elements of the story are great and help add weight to balance out the lighter, fairy tale parody elements.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

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The Practical Princess

PracticalPrincess

The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Fairy Tales By Jay Williams, 1978.

PracticalPrincessSilverWhistleThe modern fairy tales in this book (these are not traditional stories or folktales, although they are written in the style of old fairy tales) feature brave and clever girls. These are not just damsels in distress who need to be rescued, but girls who play heroic parts in their own stories. However, I don’t want you to think that the stories get too preachy about girl power. Some of the men in the stories may seem less than heroic at, but each of them is clever in their own way, and they are sometimes the main characters in the stories as well. The stories don’t lecture you about how “girls are just as good as guys and maybe even better“ or try to make the girls look smarter by making everyone else look dumb or things like that (in spite of the name, “Stupid Marco”, Marco really isn’t all that bad). They’re just fun stories in a fairy tale style with interesting heroines. The best part is that the stories also have a sense of humor.

There is only one full-color illustration in the book. The other pictures are done as silhouettes.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

The stories in the book:

The Practical Princess

When Princess Bedelia is born, she goes through the typical fairy tale ritual of having fairies give her gifts. One of them gives her common sense. When she grows up, she uses it to devise a clever plan to free her kingdom from a fearsome dragon. Unfortunately, she attracts the attention of the evil Lord Garp, who tries to force Bedelia to marry him. When Lord Garp tries to cheat at the tasks she sets for him to prove his worthiness and she catches him doing it, he imprisons her in a tower, and she must use her wits and the help of his other captive to escape.

PracticalPrincessMarcoStupid Marco

People think that Prince Marco isn’t terribly bright because, instead of applying himself seriously to his studies as his brothers do, he has a habit of spending his time daydreaming and writing poetry, and he can never remember how to tell left from right. However, he has three major accomplishments: he is an extremely likeable person, he can whistle very loudly, and he can cure even the worst case of hiccups. In his kingdom, it’s a tradition for princes to win their future brides by going out and rescuing a princess from something (how do all these princesses get into that much trouble anyway?). To make this task easier for Marco, his father tells him about a princess he can rescue and gives him a set of simple instructions to follow. Of course, Marco loses his way and the instructions. He meets a nice young woman named Sylvia who offers to help him, but still, nothing goes as planned. However, there’s more than one princess in the world and more than one type of rescuing, so things turn out well in the end.

The Silver Whistle

When Prudence comes of age, she sets out in the world to seek her fortune. Before she leaves home, her mother, the Wise Woman of the West, gives her a magical silver whistle. If she blows it once, birds will come to her. If she blows it twice, insects will come. If she blows it three times, animals will talk to her. However, she cannot blow it four times because it will break. Prudence finds employment with an old witch who has a plan to make herself beautiful so that the prince of her kingdom will want to marry her. Although Prudence has doubts about her plan, she uses her magical whistle to help her, but only to a point. Besides, people have different ideas about what beauty is.

Forgetful Fred

Fred works as kind of an odd job man for a very wealthy man named Bumberdumble Pott. However, he tends to be somewhat absent-minded because his real love in life is music, and he’s often thinking about that when he should be focusing on what he’s doing. Bumberdumble Pott continues to employ him because he’s pleasant, kind, and likable. In spite of his wealth, there is something that Bumberdumble Pott wants that he can’t buy: the Bitter Fruit of Satisfaction. It’s a rare fruit found a long way away, across mountains and deserts and is guarded by a dragon-like create, the Fire Drake. Bumberdumble Pott knows that he’s too old to undertake the quest for the fruit, so he asks among his servants if someone else will go on his behalf. The only person willing to try is Fred, and Bumberdumble Pott promises him half his gold if he succeeds. It’s a long journey, and Fred has a map to keep him focused on his task. In the end, it’s no fault of his when he isn’t able to bring the fruit to his employer for his reward, but Fred attains his own kind of satisfaction when he is able to live the kind of life he likes with the nice girl who tried to help him and is able to play his music as often as he wants.

PracticalPrincessPetronellaPetronella

For generations, the royal family of Skyclear Mountain has always had three princes, who are always given the names Michael, George, and Peter. When the princes come of age, they all go on a quest. The two eldest princes go out and seek their fortunes elsewhere, never returning to their kingdom, but the youngest always comes back with a bride to continue the royal line. When the current king and queen have a daughter instead of a son for their third child, they’re not sure what to do. They name her Petronella instead of Peter, but what’s the point of sending her out to seek a bride when she’s older?  As a princess, she should wait for a prince to seek her as a bride. However, when the time comes, Petronella insists that she wants to continue the tradition by going out to seek her fortune and find a prince for herself. Even though it seems oddly backwards from how things are supposed to go, her family agrees. When she and her brothers come to a road that divides three ways, they ask the old man sitting nearby where the roads go. He answers their questions, but Petronella asks him the correct one to release him from the spell that had kept him there. In return, he tells her that if she’s looking for a prince, she should try the house of Albion the enchanter, and he gives her advice about completing tasks that he will set for her and the rewards she should ask for, which will allow her to escape from the enchanter when she decides to flee with the prince. Petronella follows his advice, but the situation isn’t quite what Petronella thinks it is.  Like Petronella’s own situation, circumstances at the enchanter’s house are . . . oddly backwards. In the end, she ends up saving an enchanter from a prince.

Philbert the Fearful

Most knights can’t wait to charge into battle or undertake a dangerous quest, but Sir Philbert is different. He prefers to stay home, read good books, and look after his health. However, his doctor recommends that he undertake a quest because he needs the fresh air and exercise. Whether he really wants to or not, Philbert finds himself going on a quest with three other knights to save the emperor’s daughter from the fearsome enchanter, Brasilgore. The journey is dangerous, and two of the knights are killed, but Sir Philbert does return with the emperor’s daughter. When the other surviving knight complains that Philbert used more trickery than true bravery to defeat his enemies, the emperor explains the value of prudence. Philbert uses his wits to take care of himself and the princess, and there are benefits to staying alive rather than losing your life in a foolhardy stunt.