50books_poc | 3. The Seven Wise Princesses, retold by Wafa Tarnowska

The Seven Wise Princesses is a retelling of a Persian epic by Nizami Ganjavi; this version is told by Wafa Tarnowska, with illustrations by Nilesh Mistry. It reads to me a bit like an ancient self-help book – the shah in the framing story learns about love through the princesses' stories, which are heavy with symbolism. Luckily there is an appendix, or who knows if I would ever have realised, apart from the obvious colour symbolism – each of the seven princesses that the shah has gathered has chosen a different coloured pavilion to live in, and their stories are told in order to explain that choice.

I was more interested in the stories being told – which weren't even the princesses' own stories, but one's they themselves had heard – than in the framing story. I was more interested in the princesses than the shah. As a result, I found the book as a whole somewhat disappointing – though it hardly seems fair to castigate a 12th century poem for not being what I wanted!

It was sold to us as a children's book, I guess, but I'm not sure how interested most children would be in it – the original poem wasn't intended for children, and even this retelling seems more of adult interest to me, for all the lavish illustrations.