Iron Hearted Violet (review)

At seven, Princess Violet stumbles across a forbidden book in a hidden room of her Andulan castle and accidentally awakens a long-forgotten evil. The Thirteenth God, however, is a patient one, and he bides his time until Violet is an adolescent, plagued by insecurities and lost in grief for her dead mother, to persuade the girl to invite him fully into her world with a promise to make her beautiful and restore her mother. Of course, the trickster god has no such intentions, and when Violet realizes she has allowed chaos into her kingdom, she is helped by a stable boy, a few fey folk, and an aging dragon to right her wrongs and save their world. Narrated by Cassian, Andulan’s most famous storyteller, Violet’s tale has a quiet, folkloric feel, punctuated with moments of bittersweet poignancy. Violet herself is far from the genre’s usual plucky princess—driven as much by her feelings of inadequacy as she is by her sorrow, she is the picture of a little girl lost who mistakes a villain for a savior. Her self doubt will ring true to tweens just recognizing their own limitations while her eventual triumph will make them cheer, even as they are forced to consider the unavoidable damage that her actions cause. The Thirteenth God is a formidable opponent, and the mythology that Barnhill constructs around his origin is impressively detailed, adding to the feeling that this is only one of many stories to come from this realm. While Bruno’s black and white illustrations are sometimes too stiff for Barnhill’s fluid prose, the more detailed scenes echo the fairy-tale like quality of the story.