Princess Irene and Curdie

Young Princess Irene is sent to the country to be raised in a half-farmhouse, half-castle located in the side of a mountain. While exploring the top of the castle, Irene becomes lost and inexplicably finds her way to a mystifying and beautiful woman spinning a thread. Princess Irene discovers that this woman to which she is drawn is her great-great-grandmother. But after she returns, her nurse, Lootie, refuses to believe in the old woman's existence, and the young princess cannot find the way back to her great-great-grandmother. Days later, while on an outing with Lootie, Princess Irene believes that she detects a goblin. They meet a young miner, Curdie, who confirms her sighting. Soon Curdie discovers that goblins lurking under the castle have constructed an evil plot against the king and his palace. Princess Irene's belief in her great-great-grandmother's powers becomes essential as she and Curdie work to foil the sinister goblin plan. As the Princess tells Curdie, "Sometimes you must believe without seeing."

Admired by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and considered by W. H. Auden to be “the only English children's book in the same class as the Alice books,” The Princess and the Goblin is a classic example of nineteenth-century children's literary fairy tales. This is an ageless tale of courage and loyalty, beauty and mystery, and above all, good and evil. The discovery of a secret stairway running to the top of the castle where she resides leads Princess Irene to a revelation even more weighty than the fiendish plans of the goblin community that Curdie, a miner boy, has discovered. Will the Princess and Curdie understand the significance of what they have found, or will Harelip and the goblins successfully execute their evil plan?

Princess Irenes discovery of a secret stair to the top turret of the castle leads to a wonderful revelation. At the same time, the miners son Curdie overhears a fiendish plot by the goblins that live below the mountain. But it will take all their wit and courage, and the help of Irenes magic ring, to make sense of their separate knowledge and foil the goblins schemes.

In this sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie has returned to his life as a miner and has dismissed the supernatural happenings of the past, believing them to have been a dream. When Curdie callously wounds a pigeon, his conscience leads him to Princess Irene's mystical great-great-grandmother for help. She has him plunge his hands into a pile of rose petals that burns like fire. Extraordinarily, this grants him the power to see what kind of "animal" a person is at heart.She then sends him on a quest, accompanied by a peculiar doglike creature named Lina, who was once a human. However, Curdie must resolve his own skepticism before he can use the powers granted him to defeat the evil that is threatening the future of the kingdom.