Princess Ben

Author: Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Princess Ben is a coming of age story, personally, my favorite type of plot.

Benevolence is just fifteen when her mother is assassinated and her father goes missing, and poor Ben ends up under the care of the cold and calculated Queen Sophia. The Queen and Ben are immediately at odds, as teenagers often are with ostentatious authority figures.

The Queen, who has never been able to bear children, recognizes Ben as her heir and tries to groom a protesting Ben for the throne.

Eventually, Ben is sent up into a tower, where she discovers a secret room and within it, secret spells long forgotten. Ben discovers magic.
Magic becomes Ben’s delight, her refuge, until Queen Sophia determines Ben must marry in order to save the country from an invasion. Rather than wed a man she hates, Ben jumps out of her tower and uses her spells to fly away. Flying over a cliff, she discovers the body of her father, and a message scratched into the rock next to him, that sets her on the trail of his killer.

This book is meant for high school level readers. It’s not the plot, but the vocabulary that makes it so. Murdock uses sophisticated language to weave an elegantly simple plot together. This book was extremely well-paced. Not quite action packed, it was witty in all the right places and the plot moved quickly enough to keep me engaged. The main character, a chubby and unwilling princess, is delightful. Her teenage angst is true to teenage reality, but never as extreme as other teen books (ie: the Twilight series).

I would highly recommend this book. Even without reading her other works, I would highly recommend this writer: Catherine Gilbert Murdock.
Have you ready anything by this author? How did you like it? Any recommendations?

– Jazzarazz