It is Day 4 of the Agoraphobia Experiment.

Amazingly, it is going well.  It is very hot, so it is not difficult to sit indoors with the fan blasting on me.  I am reading – not Jane Austen, because I cannot read Jane incessantly – but a beautifully-written fantasy novel, A Princess of Roumania, the first of a series of four books.

First, let me talk about the agoraphobia.

Many years ago my best friend Anthea moved east and attended a free school.  She began to send me witty but strange letters, characterized by fantasy or lies, depending on how you look at it.  She claimed she had lost all the weight (she was very overweight) and was the homecoming queen.

I knew this could not be true – what free school had a football team, let alone a homecoming queen?

If only she hadn’t moved! Then she would have had friends, and not written those sad, suddenly ultra-conventional letters.

And then Anthea came to visit. She would not leave the house, not  to visit her old friends, not around the block – nowhere.

Her mother said on the phone it had been a problem.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve thought more and more about Anthea.  I always wondered what had happened to her. And no one could find her for school reunions.

Finally I found a snippet saying she had died in her forties.

Not long enough, but long enough to make a difference.

And I have a kind of survivor’s guilt.  If only… if only.. if only… 

This is a book blog, though, and I wanted to tell you about a beautifully-written, charming fantasy novel, The Princess of Roumania, which is the first in a four-book series by Paul Park.  It got great reviews from Michael Dirda at the Washington Post, Locus, The Denver Post, and was blurbed by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

In The Princess of Roumania, Miranda Popescu, a high school student, has been told that she was adopted as a baby in Constantia. Soon she learns she is actually five years older, an adult, and a princess of Roumania. But she loves her adoptive parents , who gave her a perfect childhood, and have presented her with an album the orphanage had kept for her.

One day Miranda leaves the album in a locker at school, and she and her two friends, Andromeda, a popular girl, and Peter, who was born with a birth defect, a stump for a hand, break in to get it.  But after they pick up the album, a group of terrifying men with weapons chase them. They were ordered to hunt her down and bring her to Roumania.

And it turns out that all is illusion. The United States does not exist.  They are in a faux historical U.S., where the English live like Native Americans. Peter, too, is from Roumania, a man in a position of power.  And Andromeda suddenly turns into a dog, with all the knowledge of a dog. 

I am caught in Park’s fantastic web of Roumania, and the writing is superb. The novel goes back and forth between the flight of Miranda in the faux-U.S. and the politics in Roumania.

 One of her family’s enemies, the Baroness Causaeco, is working to find Miranda.  She wants to use Miranda for nefarious political purposes.

The baroness wields magic:  she makes a simulacrum of herself to go to a ball while she herself goes about the business of hunting Miranda.  The simulacrum kills a man.  The police come to see the baroness. The evidence is the simulacrum’s coat.

Here is an example of Park’s stellar writing, about the baroness’s deception of the police. 

The baroness is SO smooth.

Fortune loves the bold, she thought.  She would show him everything, and he would leave the coat and go away.  “Let me show you my husband’s bedroom, she said, as she led him up the stair to the fourth floor, through the bathroom into her beautiful yellow bed chamber with the heavy curtains and the big four-poster bed.  “This is where I sleep now,” she said, and he had the politeness to blush.  Of her husband’s presence in that room, no trace remained. She walled past the bed, whose heavy silk coverlet, she now noticed, showed a mark of dried blood.

Great summer reading, and well-written literature.