Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale

Description

An Irish princess is kidnapped and sold into slavery in this powerful retelling of an Icelandic legend from award-winning author Donna Jo Napoli, a companion to Hidden. Melkorka was a princess, the first daughter of a magnificent kingdom in medieval Ireland-but all of this is lost the day she is kidnapped and taken aboard a marauding slave ship. Thrown into a world that she has never known, alongside people that her former country's laws regarded as less than human, Melkorka is forced to learn quickly how to survive. Taking a vow of silence, however, she finds herself an object of fascination to her captors and masters, and soon realizes that any power, no matter how little, can make a difference.

Donna Jo Napoli is the acclaimed and award-winning author of many novels, both fantasies and contemporary stories. She won the Golden Kite Award for Stones in Water in 1997. Her novel Zel was named an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Bulletin Blue Ribbon, and a School Library Journal Best Book, and a number of her novels have been selected as ALA Best Books. She is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband. Visit her at DonnaJoNapoli.com.

Napoli does an extraordinary job of using the first-person voice to keep readers in tune with Melkorka's maturing character; her beautifully recounted journey will stay with teens long after the book ends. -- Cheri Dobbs * School Library Journal *