A cute story about a nice and mischievous girl learning about empathy. It's fairly straightforward, being as it is for very young readers, but there is also some complexity here.
Princess Emily is not a mean person. Her pranks are not in the least bit malicious. They are just harmless fun, and that is what Princess Emily thinks they are, moments of fun playing around with her friends. She is sincerely shocked that her friends/subjects don't enjoy her pranks and were just playing along because she has a higher social status than them.
Thus, the immediate and explicit moral of the story is to practice empathy and read between the lines in one's relations with others, but there is another moral here. It is thus, "When someone does something that bothers you, just tell them". The only person in this story who straight-up tells Princess Emily to knock it off with the pranks is her cousin and fellow-princess, Roxanne. Even Arden, Princess's Emily advisor, has to be pushed by Roxanne to be honest.
This moral works because Princess Emily is a nice girl, not a bully. Telling an actual bully to stop would be less likely work because their motivation is different. The story makes this distinction. At the very start of the story, Princess Emily hugs Staghorn after pranking him and thanks him for being a good sport, because she thought that's what he was doing. She later tells Arden that she thinks of Staghorn as her grandfather, and so she doesn't want to upset him or have him be angry at her.
There's every reason to believe that if Staghorn had just told her the truth right then, she would have apologized. She probably wouldn't have stopped with the pranks, but she would have realized that he didn't enjoy that particular prank.
Trickster Eric Novels gives "Jewel Kingdom - the Emerald Princess Plays a Trick" an A+
Click here for my next book review: Vidia and the Fairy Crown
Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).
His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.
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