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The Swan Princess
Eleven brothers who have been turned into swans by their evil stepmother are saved by their beautiful sister, Princess Elisa.
64 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2005
6 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
About the author
Hans Christian Andersen
7,803 books3,534 followersHans Christian Andersen (often referred to in Scandinavia as H.C. Andersen) was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories — called eventyr, or "fairy-tales" — express themes that transcend age and nationality.
Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Nightingale", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and many more. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action and animated films.
Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Nightingale", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and many more. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action and animated films.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 17, 2024
WoW! This is so beautiful. Fantastic book for children. I loved it in my childhood and read this everyday before going to sleep. This Princess trying to break spell over her brothers, to they could become a human again. The book teaching that good always triumphs over evil
August 24, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Classic fairy tales with Modern Implications
This is one of those deceptively “simple” fairy tales that, when pulled apart, feels less like a bedtime story and more like a riddle about identity, suffering, and redemption dressed in the plumage of enchantment.
The tale, rooted in the same archetypal family as “The Wild Swans”, is a study in metamorphosis — not merely physical transformation (humans into swans, silence into speech) but in the more uncanny sense of what it means to survive when one’s form, voice, and agency are confiscated by forces beyond comprehension.
What fascinates 21st-century readers is how the text stages the paradox of visibility and invisibility. The princess, cursed and compelled into swanhood, embodies the volatility of female subjectivity: at once luminous, ethereal, and "graceful", yet rendered speechless, abjected, a creature more for admiration than for participation.
Andersen anticipates what feminist critics later identify as the paradox of the “angel in the house” — a body to be looked at, pitied, even worshipped, but stripped of civic or narrative power. In an era where women’s voices are still policed — on social media, in politics, and in intimate relationships — the silenced swan is not merely a fairy-tale conceit but a haunting mirror.
The very texture of the tale emphasises liminality. A swan is not simply a bird; it is an aesthetic signifier. Swans connote beauty, purity, and even aristocracy — yet they are also migratory, impermanent, and constantly between waters.
This double valence makes the princess’s entrapment doubly cruel: she is transformed not into a grotesque creature, but into a form of beauty that is also alienation. The lesson seems clear — beauty itself can be a prison, especially when it is defined by external gaze rather than internal will.
Andersen’s narrative resists a clean moral resolution. Unlike the didactic clarity of fables, The Swan Princess lingers in ambiguity: the silence required of the heroine is both her curse and her mode of redemption. She cannot protest, argue, or declare; her only weapon is endurance. In a postmodern register, this is unsettling.
Silence can be read as complicity, but also as resistance, as the slow accumulation of power that refuses to dissipate itself in speech. For contemporary readers, especially in the age of “content creation”, where speech is constant and performative, Andersen’s silent heroine suggests another paradigm: that sometimes power resides not in speaking, but in holding one’s voice in reserve, weaponising patience.
There is also an ecological undertow in the narrative that resonates now more urgently than ever. The swan is not merely a symbolic animal, but a reminder of the fragility of the non-human world. In Andersen’s time, swans were emblems of courtly spectacle. In ours, they are endangered, their habitats disrupted by climate change. To reread the tale now is to feel the ghostly presence of environmental grief.
The princess’s transformation into a bird, then, is not simply magical punishment, but an allegory of displacement — a human forced into the life of a species that modernity relentlessly imperils.
What saves the princess is not a knight’s sword or a clever ruse but a long, grinding process of devotion — weaving shirts out of nettles, sustaining wounds without complaint. This labor is unpaid, unrecognised, painful, and yet transformative.
It reads uncannily like a parable of care work, particularly the invisible labour done by women, which sustains families and societies yet rarely enters the sphere of recognition. Andersen, perhaps unwittingly, sketches the politics of care centuries before the terminology existed.
For postmodern readers, The Swan Princess ultimately refuses the closure of a “happily ever after”. Yes, enchantment is broken, but scars remain. The silence lingers even after speech returns, haunting every utterance with the memory of what was endured.
It is this residue — this inability of narrative to neatly dissolve suffering into joy — that makes the story so contemporary. Like so much of Andersen, its beauty is edged with melancholy, its redemption never quite untainted.
In our own century, where identity feels as fragile and constructed as feathers, where silence and voice are weaponised daily, and where the natural world itself trembles under enchantments of industry and profit, The Swan Princess endures less as a fairy tale and more as a postmodern allegory.
It whispers that becoming oneself is always a process of exile and return, always shadowed by the possibility that the form we occupy is both gift and cage.
This is one of those deceptively “simple” fairy tales that, when pulled apart, feels less like a bedtime story and more like a riddle about identity, suffering, and redemption dressed in the plumage of enchantment.
The tale, rooted in the same archetypal family as “The Wild Swans”, is a study in metamorphosis — not merely physical transformation (humans into swans, silence into speech) but in the more uncanny sense of what it means to survive when one’s form, voice, and agency are confiscated by forces beyond comprehension.
What fascinates 21st-century readers is how the text stages the paradox of visibility and invisibility. The princess, cursed and compelled into swanhood, embodies the volatility of female subjectivity: at once luminous, ethereal, and "graceful", yet rendered speechless, abjected, a creature more for admiration than for participation.
Andersen anticipates what feminist critics later identify as the paradox of the “angel in the house” — a body to be looked at, pitied, even worshipped, but stripped of civic or narrative power. In an era where women’s voices are still policed — on social media, in politics, and in intimate relationships — the silenced swan is not merely a fairy-tale conceit but a haunting mirror.
The very texture of the tale emphasises liminality. A swan is not simply a bird; it is an aesthetic signifier. Swans connote beauty, purity, and even aristocracy — yet they are also migratory, impermanent, and constantly between waters.
This double valence makes the princess’s entrapment doubly cruel: she is transformed not into a grotesque creature, but into a form of beauty that is also alienation. The lesson seems clear — beauty itself can be a prison, especially when it is defined by external gaze rather than internal will.
Andersen’s narrative resists a clean moral resolution. Unlike the didactic clarity of fables, The Swan Princess lingers in ambiguity: the silence required of the heroine is both her curse and her mode of redemption. She cannot protest, argue, or declare; her only weapon is endurance. In a postmodern register, this is unsettling.
Silence can be read as complicity, but also as resistance, as the slow accumulation of power that refuses to dissipate itself in speech. For contemporary readers, especially in the age of “content creation”, where speech is constant and performative, Andersen’s silent heroine suggests another paradigm: that sometimes power resides not in speaking, but in holding one’s voice in reserve, weaponising patience.
There is also an ecological undertow in the narrative that resonates now more urgently than ever. The swan is not merely a symbolic animal, but a reminder of the fragility of the non-human world. In Andersen’s time, swans were emblems of courtly spectacle. In ours, they are endangered, their habitats disrupted by climate change. To reread the tale now is to feel the ghostly presence of environmental grief.
The princess’s transformation into a bird, then, is not simply magical punishment, but an allegory of displacement — a human forced into the life of a species that modernity relentlessly imperils.
What saves the princess is not a knight’s sword or a clever ruse but a long, grinding process of devotion — weaving shirts out of nettles, sustaining wounds without complaint. This labor is unpaid, unrecognised, painful, and yet transformative.
It reads uncannily like a parable of care work, particularly the invisible labour done by women, which sustains families and societies yet rarely enters the sphere of recognition. Andersen, perhaps unwittingly, sketches the politics of care centuries before the terminology existed.
For postmodern readers, The Swan Princess ultimately refuses the closure of a “happily ever after”. Yes, enchantment is broken, but scars remain. The silence lingers even after speech returns, haunting every utterance with the memory of what was endured.
It is this residue — this inability of narrative to neatly dissolve suffering into joy — that makes the story so contemporary. Like so much of Andersen, its beauty is edged with melancholy, its redemption never quite untainted.
In our own century, where identity feels as fragile and constructed as feathers, where silence and voice are weaponised daily, and where the natural world itself trembles under enchantments of industry and profit, The Swan Princess endures less as a fairy tale and more as a postmodern allegory.
It whispers that becoming oneself is always a process of exile and return, always shadowed by the possibility that the form we occupy is both gift and cage.
July 8, 2021
I loved this book as a child and i still love it as a teen. Its an amazing book about a princess.
April 21, 2010
I like this book for two reasons: 1. Cause there is a princess in it. 2. There's swans in it. oh, wait! i just thought of another idea why I like it! She sews, but not with a string and needle. She sews with pine needles.
April 20, 2022
So, I'm not familiar with the hans Christian Anderson story, so idk if the retelling is close to the original or not. If you're expecting it to be like the movie - it definitely is not. Illustrations are lovely though the children age and they don't really look like it.
May 10, 2025
I still read this when I need a sweet, comforting story with beautiful artwork, even though I’m in college.
June 29, 2010
A very quick read, its based on the original and I haven't read the original so I don't know how much was changed or whether this story had some parts better or some parts worse. I have seen the Disney animated film but that is completely different. My favourite part of this story were Eliza and her brothers, they were all very kind and loving towards each other and I love stories with strong family bonds. I was aggravated however with their father who allowed himself to be tricked by their evil stepmother, the king who fell in love with Eliza for not really trying to save her and at one point Eliza herself for not being able to do something to rescue herself.
Still its a very short story geared towards readers much younger than myself and I believe for the length of the book it told the story well with beautiful illustrations.
Still its a very short story geared towards readers much younger than myself and I believe for the length of the book it told the story well with beautiful illustrations.
September 18, 2011
I really enjoyed this book. Princess Eliza and her brothers are perfectly happy- until their father marries a woman who is secretly a witch. Determined to get rid of the children, the witch turns the brothers into swans. But Eliza is harder to deal with. This book follows her as she sets our to undo the spell, in this retelling of of classic fairy tale.
May 24, 2008
Always have enjoyed Hans Christen Andersen!
February 6, 2009
Nicely illustrated version of the classic Hans Christian Andersen book. I think we've read this one before and our girls really enjoy the story.
April 10, 2009
I haven't read the "real" Swan Princess before because this story was really different that what I thought. (good different)
September 26, 2009
Actually,I watched the film.I liked it but not more than the Little Memaid or the others...
December 3, 2015
3.5
Quite a short book but really good. It's based on The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen. Excellent introduction to classic novels and fairytales for the junior reader
Quite a short book but really good. It's based on The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen. Excellent introduction to classic novels and fairytales for the junior reader
January 12, 2016
Such beautiful wording and artwork in this edition
June 6, 2016
Interesting story, and well written. The pictures are nicely presented too. I would recommend this book for anyone who has a little girl.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews