The Wolf Princess
A dreary English public school. An orphan. A neglectful guardian, a magical train, a boy with a crescent moon scar. The Wolf Princess threatened to be Potter in Petersburg, but luckily author Cathryn Constable resisted the temptation.
Sophie, Delphine and Marianne—students at an elite yet drab London girls’ school—are, by the most improbable of pretexts, lured to the mysterious Volkonsky Winter Palace in the heart of Russia. Orphaned in infancy, Sophie, the heroine and an ineffectual dreamer, has had a hard time finding her niche. Delphine is a doer, and Marianne is a brainiac along the lines of Harry Potter’s Hermione.
At the decaying yet still beautiful Palace, the girls meet the captivating, but slightly sinister Princess Anna. The Princess and her servants seem to have come straight from Russian mythology. Sophie becomes obsessed with the tragic legend of the Winter Palace and feels an inexplicable bond with its earlier, doomed inhabitants. The bond becomes all too real when Sophie and her friends discover that they may be the next chapter in the Palace’s tale of death.
Constable is a masterful word painter, and her descriptions of the sumptuous Palace made me long to be there. Unfortunately, The Wolf Princess combines two incompatible stories: a visit to an enchanting White Russian fairyland and an implausible modern-day crime mystery.
