A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park

Miranda Popescu, adopted from Romania in infancy, feels foreign and strange even though she‘s lived in the same college town almost all of her life. Of course, most people feel dislocated during the teenage years, but Miranda has more reason than most. Though at first she isn’t aware of the fact, she’s actually a princess from an alternate world. As political and diplomatic forces reach into our world from “Roumania,” she must decide who to trust and which reality she ought to believe.

On a blurb on the inside of the book, Terry Bisson (no idea who that is) says, “I once told Paul Park to write a tale filled with…the dark complexity of Phillip Pullman….Sooner or late, Paul always does what I tell him.” Apparently, he did. I agree that this book is very reminiscent of the His Dark Materials series. The problem is that I didn’t like that series at all. Though Pullman's concept of an animate soul is neat, I just couldn’t make myself care about the characters enough to keep them straight as they meandered through the plot. A Princess of Roumania is similar. Though the world building concept behind the story is really cool, as soon as the characters journeyed to that other world, I stopped caring what happened to them. No one there was interesting enough to draw me into the plot (which has the same ponderous rhythm as “His Dark Materials“, by the way), so I had to keep turning back to look up the characters anytime something new happened.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the Dark Materials series. Whatever it was that made you like it is probably present in this book, as well. Otherwise, don’t bother.




my rating system