Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Tasmin

My fourth-grade teacher gave me this book for a Christmas present. As with the rest of my class, I soon found that I had been given a book that suited me perfectly. It had a little bit of everything I looked for in a book, and still look for.

The main character in A Little Princess is Sara Crewe, the only daughter of a widower, Captain Ralph Crewe. Sara has a gift for story-telling. She imagines intricate and absorbing tales about magic and imaginary places. When Sara is seven, her father brings her to live at a boarding school while he goes off to make his forune larger, pretty much. Sara is a star pupil, excelling at her studies and being treated as she has all her life, like a little princess, as her father's money pays for many luxaries. When Sara is eleven years old, her father dies, and she's left a destitute orphan. She is allowed to stay at the school as a maid, but most of her belongings are sold to pay the debts Captain Crewe owed to the school, all except her doll and companion Emily and a very few clothes. For years, Sara works to exhaustion for a room in the attic and hardly any food. Despite being practically starving, she still shows the sane generosity to others as she did when she was rich, sharing a bag of buns she bought using a found coin with a little begger girl. It has a really good endng but I don't want to ruin that for anyone so I won't write about it,

I love this book because Sara never gave up, making magic from nothing but her imagination and because she gets a happy ending.I think something about this book will appeal to almost everyone, but especially to girls fourth grade and up. It's also describes London in the late 1800's very well, so you can picture it even if you haven't ever seen modern day London. It gives the book a sense of taking place very far away and yet very close, like a fairy tale.

I still read this book, and I'm almost sixteen. It stays with you for the rest of your life.