The Goose Girl

The Goose Girl is a fantasy novel by the American writer Shannon Hale, published by Bloomsbury in 2003 and the first of her Books of Bayern.

The book is a full-length version of the Brothers Grimm tale, and Hale's method was to keep the skeleton of the original and expand the parts it leaves unexplained, which is where Ani's time as an unnoticed servant, her friendship with the goose boy and her slow learning of what she can actually do all come from. The stolen name, the letters that have to be recovered and the witnesses who have to be found are the machinery of the original story, and Hale gives Ani a long stretch of the novel in which she is nobody in particular, so that her return to her own name is something the reader watches her earn. Hale wrote the first version while she was a graduate student and it ran to about eighty pages; the manuscript was rewritten around thirty times and rejected by several editors before it was published, and the kingdom Ani travels to was partly modelled on Germany. Her debut novel won the Josette Frank Award in 2003 and has been translated into several languages, and the series continued with books about the same group of characters and the same setting.