Throwback Thursdays: ‘The Goose Girl’

As I stood in the buzzing, jittering line of fellow bibliophiles, I hugged my worn copy of The Goose Girl to my chest. The other visitors who had come down to The Red Balloon Bookshop on the balmy spring evening had all purchased Shannon Hale’s newest novel, Dangerous, when they had arrived, and I was starting to worry that bringing an older story when a new one had just been released was some sort of book signing faux pas. But I had been waiting for this day for so long, and all in the hopes of having her — the Shannon Hale — sign the very book that had made me want to become a writer in the first place.

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A toadstool which represents the magical world of ‘The Goose Girl.’[/caption]

I had received The Goose Girl from my parents as a Christmas present when I was eleven. “To our very own princess,” they had written on the inside cover, along with the date and a couple of Xs and Os. I don’t remember how much time lapsed between my tearing the wrapping paper away from the book’s pastel-colored dust jacket and when I actually started reading it. The cover and the brief summary inside hadn’t immediately captured my interest. I’d assumed that the book would entertain me, certainly, but that was all that I expected. I had never before encountered anything more than a good story, something to pass the time. I’d never encountered the magic that can be woven into a novel.

It took only one sentence to capture me — one sentence to press the breath from my lungs and transport me across time and space to a world that was so vitally real:

She was born Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, Crown Princess of Kildenree, and she did not open her eyes for three days.

I still don’t understand the pull of those words. I don’t know why this one sentence was enough to catapult me into a story I’d previously had very little interest in. But it did. So I read on and on and on. I fell headlong into the novel, enthralled by the adventure within. Every word felt coated in magic, but what was even more amazing to my prepubescent self was the meaning I found behind the words.

The Goose Girl tells the story of Ani, the princess so beautifully introduced in the first sentence. A retelling of the Grimm’s fairytale, the story follows Ani as she is forced to leave her homeland of Kildenree and travel to the neighboring country of Bayern in order to marry the Crown Prince, a man she has never met. But as Ani travels the dark forest roads that lead to her new home, she is betrayed by her lady-in-waiting, Selia. Bitter and spoiled, Selia has convinced the guards who escort them to kill Ani and pretend that she has been the princess all along. Ani escapes and makes her way to Bayern, hoping that someone there will listen to her story. But no one believes her, and she is forced to find work among the peasants she had once believed she would rule. For fear of being found by Selia’s allies, Ani takes on the name Isi and hides her true identity, working for the kingdom as a lowly goose girl.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. And if you’re at all acquainted with any of the other Grimm’s tales, you know that a very satisfying portion of justice awaits the villains of the story while Ani and her friends are pretty much guaranteed some version of a “happily ever after.” The Goose Girl is not the next great American novel — despite my impassioned ravings. It’s a work of young adult literature that follows a very well-established formula. But still, there is magic in it. It still fills me with joy every time that I flip through its weathered pages.

I saw so much of myself in Ani. At only eleven years old, I already understood what it was to be ‘not enough.’ I never felt as though I fit in anywhere; a gawky goose on a lake filled with swans. To me, there is no greater heaviness of soul than the belief that one is completely alone. And that’s why The Goose Girl means so much to me. It told me — small, terrified me — that I wasn’t alone. That I wasn’t some weirdo who had no place in the world. It showed me that I could be the heroine of my own story, that I could stand up and fight.